


unassigned supplementals

by bibliocratic



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (each one more full of yearning than the last), Angst, Canon Asexual Character, Canon-Typical Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, Featuring such staples as, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Ten different versions of those three weeks in Scotland, The inherent homo-romanticism of gift-giving, all this and so much more, apocalypse shenanigans, monster!Jon (and his supportive boyfriend)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-29
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2020-10-12 16:16:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 38
Words: 54,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20567243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bibliocratic/pseuds/bibliocratic
Summary: Oneshot #38 - conclusions- or: They find Daisy(post-176, inspired by @speakerunfolding's artwork - link inside)(Short TMA JonMartin one-shots, individual warnings in chapter notes, now with a fully-functioning contents page)





	1. contents page

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally getting around to organising these, mostly so I can keep track, and so it's easier for folks to find what they're interested in. 
> 
> All one-shots are some flavour of jonmartin, predominantly fluff or angst. Individual content warnings are outlined further in the chapter.

  1. _contents page  
_
  2. _soft teasing _– or: Martin has a confession to make.
  3. _going on holiday _– or: Jon is definitely better than Martin when it comes to packing.
  4. _homecoming_ – or: Things were always going to catch up with them eventually.
  5. _hospital_ – or: Jon has a health scare. Martin frets.
  6. _night-times_ – or: That's one of the troubles, with being an Archive
  7. _hugs_ – or: Martin has made certain assumptions about Jon. [spoilers for 159]
  8. _after the end _ – or: Jon breaks [spoilers for 160]
  9. _the stranger_ – or: Something is wrong. Martin just can't quite put his finger on what.
  10. _injury_ – or: Martin knows he should have said something.
  11. _communicating_ – or: Jon is getting better at talking about things. [post 160]
  12. _bath-time _– or: Martin feels the pull of the Lonely
  13. _reclaim _– or: Martin tries to rescue Jon from Elias [post 160, with a [spectacular voice-acted and soundscaped podfic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24499672) by elfgrunge]
  14. _night-time, redux_ – or: Martin's nightmares never quite leave him.
  15. _playing games_ – or: Local Man cheats at cards, Local Avatar is obviously smitten. [spoilers for 159/160]
  16. _gift-giving_ – or: In the days after the end of the world, Jon's found something. [post 160]
  17. _gift-giving, redux_ – or: Martin has certain standards.
  18. _considerations_ – or: Jon admires the view.
  19. _lapsing_ – or: Martin's not the only one overly susceptible to the Lonely.
  20. _swapped_ – or: Lonely!Jon / Beholding!Martin
  21. _intimate rituals_ – or: Jon cuts his hair. [159/160]
  22. _paradigm shift_ – or: Sleep doesn't look pleasant. [spoilers for 161]
  23. _search party_ – or, Jon wakes up and Martin is gone. [post 160]
  24. _adaptations_ – or: Martin's quite taken with all the new eyes, personally.
  25. _legacies_ – or: Martin worries about being a father.
  26. _bacchanal_ – or: Jon and Martin buy cheap wine and get slaughtered. [159/160]
  27. _open and honest_ – or:Jon and Martin clear the air. [spoilers for 166]
  28. _pledge_ – or: There are very few things Martin can trust in these days. [spoilers for 166]
  29. _battlefronts_ – or: Jon hides an injury from Martin. [post 160]
  30. _recovery_ – or: It was easier when Martin could just blame it on the Lonely.
  31. _variants on a scenario_ – or: Ten Martin Blackwoods walk into a house. [spoilers for 170]
  32. _cruelty_ – or: This new world isn't kind to men who look like Jon. [post 160]
  33. _cut_ – or: Tim is mildly cursed
  34. _shallow / fluttering _– or: OG Archive Crew sad-time hours
  35. _resplendent / hypnotic _– or: Scottish safehouse soft moments [159/160]
  36. _caretaking_ – or: Slowly and simply, they get together [159/160]
  37. _mirror _\- or: Martin looks just like his dad.
  38. _conclusions - _or: They find Daisy [post-176, inspired by @speakerunfolding's art - link in chapter]


	2. soft teasing

“Jon?”

“Hm?”

“I’ve a confession to make.”

Martin’s tone is half-dozy, face mushed into Jon’s collar-bone. It takes a moment for Jon to translate his hummed words into language.

“Hmm?” Jon replies, and stretches a little, shiftless and pliant under the covers.

“We can’t have a cat.”

Jon doesn’t open his eyes. He does however, archly raise an eyebrow out of habit.

“That’s your confession?”

“Mm,” Martin makes a lethargic affirmative noise and with a groan finally removes his face from where it’s been burrowed. He has fabric lines on his cheek, and his tornado of curls are flattened at one side. “You really like cats, an’ really want a cat and we were talking about it an’ I just wanted to, you know, break it to you now that we can’t.”

Jon attempts not to smile at Martin’s voice, worn down by the lazy Saturday morning to a mumbled softness. Jon fails regularly at a number of things in his life, and this is at the top of his list of repeated misdemeanors. He is becoming such a proficient criminal, with Martin in his life.

“It’s a bit late to tell me you’re a dog person,” he chides instead. “I’m afraid I might have to call this whole thing off, if that’s the case.”

Martin looks up at him with his face squashed into his ‘you are not, and have never been funny, Jonathan’ face, before he blearily blinks again and shifts his leg so it’s wedged tighter in the structure of close heat their bodies have made.

“I’m allergic,” he says, sounding a little disappointed himself. “Something in their fur.”

Jon fixes his eyes on him, and schools his expression into a put-upon disappointment. It is hard to tell when Jon is joking, if you’ve not worked to decipher the signs. Martin used to think he didn’t. That’s been one of his favourite things, about really getting to know Jon. Learning that the reality could keep surprising him.

Jon expels a laboured sigh to emphasise his apparent annoyance.

“First the degree,” he says. “Now the cats. Are there any other deceptions I need be aware of, Mr Blackwood?”

Martin breaks into a grin, shoving Jon a bit, but Jon is – as he is in all things – determined to be a professional, and a bit of a show-off when he wants to be. He doesn’t crack a smile, give any indication he’s anything other than entirely straight-laced.

Martin is not so talented. With the structural integrity of a crumbling sandcastle, he grins as he pretends to continue his confessions, breaking a little with aborted laughter.

“I’m not really ginger,” he says, trying to think of something random that might make Jon laugh.

“I see,” Jon continues drolly, entirely committed to his dry, haughty spiel, not even ghosting a smile. His expression implies he’s wearing glasses perched at the end of his nose. “Straight from a bottle, is it?”

“Yep. Part of my masterplan.”

“Of course. And which masterplan would that be?”

“Sleeping with the boss.”

Aha! Jon’s lips make a barely noticeable shiver of a smirk, but that’s as good as corpsing in Martin’s book.

“Elias will be pleased to hear it.”

Martin shoves Jon again and makes a noise that indicates exactly how little he likes that particular mental image. Jon’s face twitches again, and he looks inordinately smug at how he’s currently winning.

“You, you idiot.”

“My my,” Jon continues, completely flatly, and Martin manages not to break into chuckles at the serious look on Jon’s face but it’s a close close thing. “What a sordid web I’ve been ensnared in.”

“Mm,” Martin agrees, and, missing the warmth, settles his head back against the arm Jon’s thrown out behind him. “I was hoping to sleep my way to a better Christmas bonus.”

Martin’s pleased with his two-fold joke – the idea that a relationship with Jon would get him laid, but mostly that working for an eldritch omniscient panopticon would entail any sort of seasonal employment benefits.

“And,” he continues, “everyone knows you can’t resist red-heads.”

This is not actually true. Martin is very aware that he’s not Jon’s usual type, in the same way that Jon was not – initially at least – his. They were not designed for each other, he muses sometimes. But Martin has been learning that his life does not have to be poetry, does not need metaphors and destiny to fill up the spaces of him with something he might romantically call joy. This hollow in the centre of things, they’ve dug it out themselves. There are the grooves where their fingers carved out this space. The edges of them they sanded off with time and compromise, spines softened to make their pieces fit.

Lying here with Jon, sticky with a low summer heat, his t-shirt sucked against his skin, Jon’s hair tickling against the side of his face. There’s no poetry written about this. Martin’s not going to be the one to write it.

Jon’s face twitches with an almost-smile. Martin forges on.

“I found out about your massive crush on Ed Sheeran, knew I would be in there if I just went ginger. You wouldn’t be able to resist.”

“Oh yes,” Jon says, with the toneless agreement that suggests that he has very little idea who Ed Sheeran actually is. “Ed Sheeran. My only weakness.”

Martin’s laughter pools in him then, and he’s snorting his giggles into the covers he pulls over his face. Jon loses it a moment after, quieter, face crackling into wide open grin that lightens up every part of him, the laugh rumbling in his throat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note:
> 
> While there is reference to sex and mild verbal teasing on the topic, this is done with the clear understanding that Jon is ace. Feel free to assume they've had that discussion ages and ages ago, which is why Martin feels it's appropriate to make a 'sleeping with the boss' joke. I'll never not write Jon as ace, so if at any point my work doesn't make that clear or unintentionally implies the opposite, please let me know so I can immediately rectify this.


	3. going on holiday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> soft domesticity, post-watcher's crown alternative happy-ending timeline

“Jon!” Martin is shouting with his head shoved in the under-stairs closet. Tone deadened to a loud mumble, and he’s knocked something heavy over that sounds like the ironing board or the drying rack in his attempt to grab things that he always inconveniently shoves away right at the back. “You got your raincoat?”

“I won’t need it,” comes the low response from the kitchen.

“The weather said it might rain.”

“It’ll be fine,” Jon replies, only half listening really, with a willfully misplaced confidence in the weather.

(And it will rain when they get off the train, a spatter of showers that they get caught in, and the coat will be in the suitcase, inaccessible. Martin won’t say anything as Jon huddles against him as they share the single umbrella, but the smugness will be in the tone of his voice as he comments on the laden clouds – _looks like it might be a proper downpour, Jon, maybe for the rest of the afternoon, what a shame the forecast didn’t predict anything like this –_ and Jon will run his hands through his thinning hair already dripping into his face and weather this with the appropriate amount of mild chagrin, knowing Martin will take pity and relent momentarily, fuss over the damp and the cold and Jon’s endless ability to catch whatever bug is going round, and bundle him into a cafe to dry off.)

“I’ll pack it anyway,” Martin calls back, kicking something else with his foot that sounds like the hoover. “In case.”

Jon sighs, but it is a long-worn gentle sound that did not expect to win this ground. He resumes his task, folding and rolling a week's worth of their combined shirts, sweaters and trousers neatly and efficiently into their modest suitcase. He is very good at this, packing. Always has been good at finding room for things when he thought nothing else would fit. It brings him a self-satisfied pride, knowing each thing has its place, that there will be space for more.

(Martin will insist on buying a fridge magnet from the first tacky shop they see on the seafront, a few postcards to send to Basira, Daisy, Georgie and Melanie. Jon will find a way to sneak off as he always does and buy another souvenir spoon to add to his expansive collection, one for every place he’s been with Martin, this one with a blue and silver crest adorning the top, and he’ll play completely innocent when Martin comes across it cleaning a month later – _I thought I told you I got another one, must have slipped my mind / Jon, we don’t have the room, you’re going to have to start putting them in boxes up the loft / I will, fine, I will, tomorrow. )_

Tucked subtly at the bottom of the case where Martin won’t think to look, Jon’s placed two smart dress shirts and matching ties. The dress shirt is the mint coloured one with the little embroidered flourishes on the collar tips, room for cufflinks, Martin’s favourite, the one he always wears when he wants to impress; it’s worn at the under-arms a little, the button right at the bottom lost somewhere and Jon knows Martin will look dashing in it. He’ll need help with the tie because he always does but that’s where Jon comes in. Martin doesn’t know Jon’s booked a table at a nice restaurant tomorrow, theatre tickets for the early evening, and Jon’s giddy in his own way to reveal it like a bouquet of flowers from a magician’s sleeve.

(Jon will touch the ring on Martin’s right ring finger – with the tenderness of the joints in his hands, the way they sometimes swell in the cold, it’s too small to be worn on the traditional place; but then again when has tradition ever really mattered – and Martin will call him soft, and Jon will know Martin is looking at him _like that _and Jon will not disagree).

“Socks?” he shouts out, wondering if Martin’s left the closet yet or if he’s found another umpteen things he’s thought that they should bring. He has already argued Martin out of bringing an extra book (_You won’t have time to read it, it’ll just take up room_), walking boots (_It’s Dorset, Martin, not the Peak District_), and his Polaroid camera (_You’re already bringing the digital one, and we’ve only got a few shots left, we should save them for Georgie’s birthday party_).

“I put them with the boxers. Next to the toaster.”

Jon huffs and moves away from the suitcase spread-eagle on the kitchen table to grab the messy, teetering pile of boxers and socks on the counter-top. He hums off-key and mindless as he brings them back to his workspace, refolding them to stuff them down the sides of the suitcase, smoothing over rucks and bumps, double checking on the ties stuffed into the spare pair of shoes Martin had won the argument for bringing.

A _flump _in front of him and Martin is dropping things onto his carefully organised packing. Jon frowns, and touches at the wool. They’re going to Bournemouth, he thinks with another internal eye-roll, not the Outer Hebrides.

“Really, we won’t need all this.”

“Just in case.”

This is Martin’s mantra. He’s an ‘everything-goes’ sort of packer. There is a reason Jon is the one responsible for wielding an iron-fisted utilitarian hand over this aspect of the holiday.

Jon runs a hand over the fabric, bobbling in places, darned at the fraying edges of the sleeves. Well-loved and well-washed.

“Another jumper?” he says, ready to dismiss it with another lecture on saving space.

“It’s to wear now. It’ll be cool all morning, I checked. You’ll be cold on the train.”

Jon concedes this battle as to his circulation like he does every time, and does as he’s bid, shoving it over his head without complaint. Martin fixes his collar so it sticks out over the neckline, smooths down any hair that’s been disrupted, making some comment about that barber down the road doing a nice job with the cut this time, before declaring with a cheeky smirk that 'he’ll do’. Jon makes an affected moue, and cups his face, kisses his cheek, making a comment that he’ll just have to try harder. These things are routine now. Beloved in their repetition.

“Have you got the tickets?” Martin asks. It’s the third time he’s checked, but Jon replies with steady patience.

“In the backpack, at the front.”

“Pills? There should be enough. I went to Boots to fill up your prescription this morning.”

“Same place. What about you? You have enough?”

“I’ve got enough for another week before I have to go back.”

“You taken yours for the journey?”

“I’ll see how I go.”

“Martin,” Jon says. Not admonishing but with an echo of his old battle-axe charm he used to possess in his earlier days. “Come on.” He knows Martin won’t have taken any, doesn’t like to feel too dependent on them. But travelling is stressful at the best of times, never mind in London, what with the traffic and the noise and the people and the jostling, and the crowds can unsettle him.

Jon’s pulling them out of his trouser pocket, a little packet still mostly full, and passing them over.

“They make my mouth dry,” Martin complains, but he goes and fills a glass of water from the tap and dutifully swallows one he pops out of the crackling foil.

“We can buy something nice to drink before we get onboard,” Jon promises, tucking the pills into the front pocket of the backpack next to Jon’s supply. "A coffee or something."

“You spoil me,” Martin says dryly and Jon feels his face crinkle in a smile. He zips the suitcase shut and gives a little _voila_.

“Taxi should be here in ten,” he says. “Oh, remind me that we’re going to need some more tea bags for when we get back.”

“Jon?”

“Hmm?”

“We’re going to need more tea bags for when we get back.”

“Oh hahaha.”

Jon has made a checklist on his phone, mostly to appease Martin, and he hears him running down what’s been noted as essential things to remember, muttering to himself to clarify – _so we’ve got all the t-shirts, sandals for the beach, you’ve got the tickets and if not there’s the email confirmation, checked the train line websites, all networks running as usual and on time….._

Jon puts his arms around Martin’s back as he reads, letting his head rest against him. Martin’s used his nice body wash this morning, sandalwood and citrus, the stuff he uses when he thinks the day’s going to be a particularly good one. He’s put on a little too much aftershave as usual.

“You should have a nap on the train,” he says, interrupting Martin’s review. “Heard you moving around all night.”

“Just my leg giving me grief. I got a heat pack, it helped some. I’ll be ok,” Martin hums in reply. Jon doesn’t respond, but he is quietly confident in the knowledge that once they’ve found their seats, Martin will drop off like a cliff-edge, and Jon will get to listen to his audiobooks until he has to nudge him awake to say they’re nearly there.

(Martin will fall asleep on him, head a solid weight on Jon’s shoulder and not even out of London yet, and Jon will thread their hands together before he starts up his current Le Carre book, one headphone dangling out so he can both listen for the stops and to hear the staff with the drinks trolley in advance. Martin will wake up with a jolt and a snuffle and a 'wethereyetJon?’ and Jon will say 'Only just passed Southampton’ and press a mediocre, still cooling cup of tea into his hand.)

There’s a chirp and a brush by Jon’s trouser leg.

“Hello you,” he says to the Duchess.

You fed her?” he asks Martin.

There’s a hopeful cry that implies that eons have passed since she was last given sustenance.

“She’s been fed and she knows it.” Martin replies, sounding as though he is immune to the charms of their cat (he is not), and that he won’t be tempted into giving her a few more treats before they leave (he will).

“I’ve given Tom house keys,” Martin says finally, checking that last one off the list. “He’ll pop in tonight to feed her and change the litter tray, make sure no one robs us or anything.”

“All your books,” Jon replies without intonation. “How could they resist?”

Martin makes some snarky comment about how he hopes any hypothetical thief might help Jon slim down his spoon collection, and Jon snorts and gives his back a little headbutt to show he doesn’t approve.

“We’ll have to get him something to say thanks,” Martin continues, returning to their previous topic. “A stick of rock or something.”

“Hmm,” Jon says and doesn’t move away from the heat of Martin’s back, his arms still bracketing around Martin’s stomach. He slept badly last night as well. Disturbed by Martin’s restlessness and his own unforgiving dreams. Martin stands like a foundation stone before he turns around, the phone set next to the suitcase and fixes the situation to his liking, embracing Jon in a loose hug.

“You tired, love?”

“Hmm.”

“We can have a nap then, when we get to the hotel.”

“We aren’t that old,” Jon grumbles, although his heart isn’t really in it because honestly, a nap sounds great right about now.

Martin’s hair, growing out on the long side now, scratches soft against Jon’s face. It is still a vibrant carrot-top in Jon’s head. He’ll run his hands through springy curls still thick and knotted, or bestow sleep-slow kisses on it, and the recollection of that particular shade has never left him. Martin’s hair hasn’t been entirely ginger since the Watcher’s Crown failed, to believe Martin, or Basira, who has always been entirely honest about the shipwrecks their life in the service of eldritch fear entities made of their youth, but Jon doesn’t care. That’s the memory he has, no matter how many laugh lines begin to grace and soften Martin’s face, how often Martin wonders idly if he should dye his hair, get rid of the white. (He never will). Jon hasn’t been able to see the mess of his own hair in a mirror for a long time now, but he doesn’t need to know it’s lost the war of attrition against the grey.

Two men who both look old before their time. Jon didn’t even think they’d get this lucky.

There’s a ping from Martin’s phone.

“That’ll be the taxi,” he says and grabs the suitcase, hefting it down off the table. “You got the tickets?”

“_Yes, Martin,_” Jon says, a little exasperated, but mostly fond, ever ever so fond. (He will say it like this for the rest of his life).

Jon grabs his stick, folded up and pockets it. Bends down, scratches the cat behind the ears, double-taps his own pockets to check on the theatre tickets.

“Let’s go on holiday,” Jon says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Headcanon: Martin has a collection of novelty cufflinks. He doesn't know how it happened, Jon just kept coming home with new ones as impromptu gifts for him. He privately thinks some of them are hideous, but this doesn't stop him wearing them, because Jon always looks so pleased when he does.
> 
> Feel free to send me jonmartin prompts on Tumblr - I'm bibliocratic there!


	4. homecoming

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> some cw / tws apply. See end notes for more details.

The house is dawn-quiet when they arrive. The day has dragged on long for them to get here; the house is out of the way, far from London and deliberately so, a nondescript little housing estate in an unexceptionable seaside town that is famous for nothing, that draws few tourists and where life generally unfolds as unmemorably as linen. 

As they get the door open, easing it back on its lock silently so as not to stress the hinges before closing again with a tut of the mechanism, the early strain of the hour has shrouded the hallway in dimness – a street-lamp a little further down the row of identical standing houses provides dull silvery accents to the photo-frames displayed along the wall of the corridor. They admire the frozen memories. A weekend trip to Bournemouth, the sky pocked with clouds and overcast, gloved hands holding packets of sea-side chips eaten with wooden forks. A surprise holiday on the continent, with the man on the left looking aggressively sun-burnt and the man on the right looking obviously touristy, and both looking happy and sweaty on some Mediterranean veranda. A trio of snaps chronicling a private wedding service with few in attendance; a formal photo, both complimentary and suited, another of those witnessing, dressed up smart and flanking the wedded pair; another evidencing a tender moment clearly caught fortuitously by an unprofessional photographer. 

They touch the photo, observing the glassy joy of the taller man, bow-tie wonky and messy from dancing, the unrestrained smile of the shorter, hair that had been clearly combed into a rare state of attention now shaken out, the shy and tipsy delight on his face as he is caught in a surprised and giddy kiss.

There is the expected paraphernalia of a home lining the corridor like domestic pageantry – a key bowl, a pinboard with scattered notices for bin collection days or prescription refill dates or pre-bought tickets for some performances or another. Moving along the hallway, off to the left, the kitchen sedately sits in the almost-dark. Dishes have been left to drip-dry by the sink, the tap is leaking irregularly with a broken patter. Further along, the living room. They thought they might find someone napping on the couch, fallen asleep on the settee, a TV turned down low on some late night channel, but the room is also coddled into stillness by the late hour. A throw blanket is haphazardly nearly slipping off the sofa, a carriage clock on the mantel rhyming gently – on the patterned armchair, the coiled full-stop of a cat is undisturbed by their entrance. 

Up the stairs, the wallpaper is marked every few feet by the outlines of framed posters or little artworks; on the landing directly at the top, a bookcase. They admire the obvious concessions made to variant tastes; half the shelves dedicated to dry, academic tomes on non-fiction topics spanning from Ancient Sumeria to a Beginners Guide to Wood Carving, and squashed in the other half, a scramble of slim poetry collections sandwiched by a tumble of genre fiction. Decorating the shelves, small trinkets from random destinations or quiet adventures; a miniature dragon holding a Welsh flag; a snow-globe from Munich; a number of souvenir spoons with their shields proudly polished to a shine. They step carefully across the thick shag carpet, off to the right where the bedroom is. Turning the handle delicately, putting every effort not to disturb the quiet, they steal inside with barely a creak.

The light is gloomy as in the rest of the house, effused with a hint of morning without making much concession, but there is enough slipping through the curtain gaps to see by.

On the left side of the bed, the side-table ill-used by dog-eared books and what appears to be the upturned contents of someone’s pockets – cough-sweets, nicotine gum, stray coppers and odd change – is Jon. Curled half-in and half-out of the covers, his face shoved against the pillow like he’s trying to bury himself, his right leg is kicked out and exposed to the morning, goose-pimpling in the chill. They find themselves smirking again to see him like this, all his hard brash sides sanded down by age and wear, gracefully having embraced middle age, an influx of grey crowning his hair. He looks soft. Content. All his guards down as he sleeps without the dreams the Eye would have bestowed on him.

They lean over, indulgently running a hand lightly through the hair straggling over his face, and he shifts blearily, mumbling a questioning _Martin?_

His right hand, fisting loosely against the pillowcase in sleep, still bears the ravaging marks they put there.

He’s a light sleeper, and they knew he would be. Didn’t want him to wake too soon, to be denied a proper welcome. Jon shifts and stretches and burrows as he slips dazedly into consciousness, nestling tighter against the body next to him still fast-asleep before the thick weight of sleep is dropped and they jolt up, a punched out breath of shock escaping them. And finally they are witnessed.

They watch his expressions free-fall from understanding to despair. His eyes, even now too sharp for his face, a little too hungry, they’re shiny in the low light. Flooded with fear. Blown-out with the intensity of it. Exactly what they were hoping for.

“Don’t,” he pleads in a sleep-ruined voice, croaking with dryness. He is already moving his body, positioned like a lanky pillar to be between them and their companion, and it’s sweet they think, it really is, it’s exactly what they hoped to find, two people living in a hard-won happiness. Nice for some, they suppose, while it lasts.

The sound wakes the man on the other side of the bed, and he turns over, ruffled, slower to stir and a groan of complaint almost on their lips. They must catch the tone of Jon’s voice though, because they’re sitting up, preparing to solve the problem – _wos it? _they ask, _wos wrong?_

Before they see them too, and stiffen into a bright terror that’s obvious as a firework, and it is such a beautiful thing to see. They must be Martin, they think, giving them the once over; their hair is shorter than in their wedding photographs, and since then they’ve settled into that comfortable rounding that can come in middle age. They weren’t really sure what they expected, when they finally found out where the former Archivist had been hiding out all these years, married and playing domestic, thinking that the crimes of the past might let him alone to be happy.

Oh but this is good. Better than good. It’s going to be _fun._

The frizzy-haired husband jolts when they reach down into their pocket. He’s set his jaw like he’s going to do something brave, something foolhardy.

She hopes he will. She likes it when they put up a struggle.

“Don’t what, Archivist?” Jude Perry asks, grinning as she lights a match.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw for stalking, non-consensual touching, home invasion and implied violent intent


	5. hospital

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jon gets admitted to hospital, Martin worries.

The rocking against his shoulder knocks him shuddering from his worrying. It is like being unmoored, cast back into the tumult and it takes a while for Martin to blink, to align the vision of who is rousing him with who they are.

It’s both a relief and a disappointment that it’s not the doctor with news.

“Anything?” Lewis asks. A brisk voice, demanding, but it’s unsteady and catches in his throat and little things like that have always given him away. “Have they… is there any news?”

Martin is standing up, gathering him up in a tight hug. He’s tall, but not in the way Martin is – he’s bony and meatless and his posture is terrible no matter how often he’s been lectured on it, and it’s such a relief that he’s here, that Lewis is gripping just as hard and just as scared.

“Nothing yet,” Martin says, and he’s attempting to sound optimistic, the sounds made wrong in his mouth, and it’s too much like lying to comfort either of them. He doesn’t want to deliver meaningless platitudes, repeat like rote statistics of recovery, of _chances, _but he doesn’t want to worry him, and it’s in that sort of double-think he lingers, the sort of equivocation that comes with parenthood.

Lewis must have come straight from uni, he thinks. He’s washed out from the travel, wired and jittery from tasteless on-board coffee-grit. There was delays at every leg of the journey down from Liverpool, and when Lewis slumps himself down like a dropped bag, he’s still not worn down those frantic mechanisms in him, the clock-watching, the checking for news, for updates.

“Have you eaten?” Martin asks, an old fall-back, casting an eye over him. He might have some change in his pocket, he thinks, for the vending machine back along the corridor. It’s been a busy term, and video calls don’t quite do things justice, because he worries that maybe Lewis has lost weight, maybe he’s not eating properly, or it might simply be the unkind lighting of the waiting room.

“I’m not hungry,” Lewis says, providing a round-about answer to the question. He’s a sharp young man, made of edges and this burning thirst to _prove himself _that Martin knows doesn’t come from him, and to anyone else the way he sometimes talks can come across as dismissive, a hand-wave of a tone designed to disregard the topic. But Martin knows him. Knows his son. Knows it’s not meant like that.

Watches him fiddle his bottom lip with his teeth, jitter his leg up and down, and wishes this was something he could kiss better like the old days.

“What about…” he fumbles for the strings of some other conversation. “Were your tutors ok? With you … just leaving like that?”

“They’ll understand it was an emergency.”

“You had a… you have your final essay due on Monday, what will…?”

“They’ll give me an extension, it’s fine.”

Martin nods and goes back to twisting the ring on his left hand, round and round and round. Surely he should have heard something by now, it’s been hours of waiting, what if something’s gone wrong, what if he wasn’t fast enough…

“Dad?”

“Yeah?” Martin looks at Lewis, his glasses all smudged and mucky because he forgets to clean them.

Lewis puts a hand on his arm.

“Are you… are you ok?” he asks, uncharacteristically tentative, and looks right at Martin. A rare gesture of eye contact, held for more than a flicker of time.

“I’m… I’ll be fine,” Martin says – Martin lies – because that’s the best he can muster right now. What he thinks, but will never say out loud is – _I’m not ready for this. I don’t know how I ever could be. I can’t imagine doing any of this on my own._

He hasn’t moved from this chair. He’s convinced himself that if he stays here, then everything will turn out ok, and it’s stupid, yeah he knows it, but that this point he’ll take any backwards ridiculous quirk of brain chemistry that counts as superstition.

His sleeves are damp and his eyes must be a mess and his fingers are bitten to nothing, and he’s still got a coat thrown over his pyjamas for god’s sake, and still he hasn’t heard anything.

Lewis doesn’t believe him, but he keeps his hand where he placed it on his arm. And Martin supposes that’s fair. He’d called Lewis after a few minutes of building his composure, swallowing down shuddering breaths and pushing out air too hard, telling himself that he needed to calm down, that he couldn’t go to pieces, not now, not yet – _Lew? Lew, it’s – it’s your… I’m sorry to be calling so early but I think you should…. You need to come home. As soon as you… It’s – it’s your father. He’s had… he’s at the hospital._

(And he was proud of himself then, because stammering as it was, incapable of communicating the enormity of a moment he couldn’t comprehend fully, his voice did not betray the terror it had. Not when he had heard the sound of the fire alarm sniping, assuming the toaster settings had been left on too high or something, walking into the kitchen to see the toast popped up, burning and ignored, Jon, frowning, confused, breathing funny with his palm over his chest, sucking in air in straggling little hitching gasps; Jon meeting his eyes, tears already sprung into the corners – _Martin, something’s wrong. _Not when Martin had juggled calling 999 and holding Jon’s weight bodily up, swaying and light-headed and his breathing seeming a whetstone to the pain, clutching him too hard and none of Martin’s words being enough. Not when he was sat in the back of the ambulance, Jon barely holding his hand, wondering if this, this was the great joke of the bloody universe, the Archivist surviving everything but his heart in the end.)

There is a patting sound, sensible shoes slapping squeaky tile, moving towards them. Martin’s world loses colour when he sees the doctor.

Lewis is standing immediately, tumbling through a number of quick-fire questions, and the doctor does a good job of not looking rattled.

“Are you a family member?” he replies, and he’s not obviously looking between Martin and Lewis, failing to find much resemblance, but he is definitely looking. It’s perhaps more delicate than others have been in the past, inquiring about their relationship to each other. Martin is well aware that Lewis looks nothing like either of his parents. He likes to think, in his more fanciful paternal moments, that he has Jon’s prominent jawline, his propensity for scruffy stubble, sees something of his husband in the brown of his eyes.

“Our son Lewis,” he gestures with a weak wave and the doctor nods, before he slides into explanations. Lewis is keeping up, asking questions about the procedure, the complications, recovery and where they go from there, and the doctor is trying to be sensitive but his son is bullish, wanting every detail and he’s so much like his father like this, headstrong and unwilling to yield an inch.

It’s good news. Better than hoped. Martin is too exhausted to smile. The rush of relief that should un-tense his muscles, pull the curtain down on the performance his anxieties have been playing out behind his eyes, instead it has left him hollow and dizzy.

“Lew,” Martin says, and Lewis turns, and must see something he can’t because he quietens, his expression shifting softer, moves over to grab Martin’s walking stick from where it’s lent against the seat, pressing it into his palm. He puts a hand on Martin’s shoulder.

“Let’s go see him,” he says, and Martin takes the arm offered to help him to his feet.

They follow the doctor. Martin’s not been fast on his feet, not since the Watcher’s Crown, but he can’t lay all the blame at the foot of that particular clusterfuck; age hasn’t been on his side either in this regard, and his progress isn’t as fast as he wants it to be. Lewis and the doctor are talking about Jon, something about local anaesthetic, sedation, how Mr Blackwood-Sims has an unusually high tolerance to anything they give him – and some part of Martin’s brain thinks this is probably Jon’s weird former Archivist powers, the rippling after-effects of which have never quite left him. Martin is not really listening to either of them. He puts one foot in front of another, and tries to feel relieved, and he should, he _should, _it’s good news, this is what he wanted.

Jon nearly died today, his brain keeps reminding him. You nearly lost him, you nearly weren’t fast enough.

And Martin is not strong enough to disagree.

Jon is awake when they go onto the shared ward. Propped up to sitting, already looking slightly bored at the lack of anything to do. There’s an IV taped up and held in place on his scarred hand, and he looks like a wind-knocked scarecrow what with all the wires and tubes he’s hooked up to, his hair unbrushed and tussled all over the place. He is not as pale as he was, more exasperated than frightened, and Martin tries to forget the last expression he saw on his husband’s face. He feels a hitch in his throat but swallows it down.

“Lewis?” Jon says, sounding surprised. “I thought you had an essay due Monday?”

“Before someone got themselves admitted to hospital,” Lewis replies easily, but he’s striding forward, giving his father a hug that betrays his worries, holding on a bit too long, leaning over the bar around the bed with discomfort.

“Really,” Jon grumbles, but he seems pleased at the unexpected attention and hugs back with the hand not tangled up in wires. “All this fuss over nothing, you didn’t need to come all this way.”

“I hear you got the ambulance service out. Doesn’t seem like nothing,” Lewis responds and Jon waves a hand as though the comment is not worth his time.

“Are you eating?” he says instead, looking over their son critically. “You don’t want your dad worrying. I won’t hear the end of it.”

It’s a teasing pattern of back-and-forth, familiar and shot through with affection, but Martin can’t be part of it. His hands don’t know what to do with themselves. He doesn’t have any words that can make any of this palatable, none of this, because they’re in a hospital, again, after surviving everything else, and he thought he was done being frightened of this.

He sees Lewis nudge his father.

“Go gentle, yeah?” he hears him murmur admonishingly. “You really scared him.”

Jon looks right at Martin then. There’s sorrow cutting into the lines of wrinkles there, some acknowledgement of what just happened finally gracing his face. Martin is shuffling forwards to the side of the bed, and Jon is reaching up, cupping Martin’s cheek.

“You saved me again, I see,” he says, teasing if it wasn’t so soft, so quiet, so clearly for only the two of them. There’s a weight of histories there, the many times they’ve both been here before, but Jon is looking at him so sadly, rubbing a thumb over the tear-stains on Martin’s cheek. There’s such blinding trust in his eyes. Martin doesn’t know, because Jon doesn’t know how to put it into words, but even as the pain spiked hard in his chest and he struggled to breath, Martin had been there and so some part of him knew it would have been ok. Martin would have made it so. “I knew you would.”

Martin is wrapping his arms around him then – _oh god, Jon, don’t you ever do that to me again –_ and Jon is solid under him, gripping tight,and it’s like being able to breath again.


	6. night-times

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> That's one of the troubles, with being an Archive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (very very very faint spoilers for episode 160, definitely not canon compliant)
> 
> mostly fluff but some cws in the end notes.

It is a Friday night, and the sky dimmed to a light-polluted darkness hours earlier. Mist decks the low thickets of gorse bushes, the stolid feet of apple trees, the garden outside adorned so heavily in shadow as to be unseen. Their house an inlet of light amidst it all. Jon has had a glass and a half of wine, and his lips are staining red, his tongue purpling, and his eyes are growing too tired to cross-stitch. Martin complains at the taste when he finally confesses to the lateness of the hour and gets up to go to bed, kissing him goodnight. He starts to gather up the unwashed plates and cutlery from dinner, as he tidies away the empty IPA bottles with their bright obnoxious labels, but Martin knocks him with his foot and tells him to leave them alone, do them in the morning, stop fussing and go to bed. It is soft and chiding, and Jon grouses sleepily but does as bid. 

Jon heads up to bed first, intent on reading for a bit, and Martin promises to be up in a bit, saying something about wanting to get some writing done. But the night is bitter and wintry, and the cat manages to get under the covers and burrows into Jon's side and his eyes are drooping before he even has a chance to take the bookmark out. 

Martin is climbing into bed after twenty minutes, disrupting the cat, smelling of toothpaste, his fingers faintly pruned from doing the washing up. Jon rouses briefly from his slumber before he turns over and into the new source of heat, mumbling a 'night before he settles back in. 

It is the heat that does it. He wakes sluggish but all at once, slow-brained and mired in a dull confusion as to why he's not sleeping. Martin is still curved against his back, having stretched out at some point, pushing Jon over to the edge of the bed. Breathing slow, heavily, rumbling a little in his chest, the sound filling him up rhythmically like the bellows of some sturdy forge. Pressing against him like compacting earth. An arm is thrown over Jon, loosely bracketing him, and Jon brings a hand up to touch it; the skin is heat-sweaty, warm from the closeness.

His fingers brush dirt, come away filthy. He can't see it, not such a complete dark as the night affords them, but the texture is the damp soil of potting plants, and he can feel the smear it leaves behind when he brushes it off. The heat is a close and cloying thing, and Jon can feel the loamy tightness of it in his lungs. 

Logically, he knows the only thing behind him is Martin. Snoring, his t-shirt rucked up sometime in the night, exposing his stomach to the air, one bedsock kicked off, who will be grumpy and trying not to show it in the morning if Jon wakes him. The grip that is holding him, loose, carefully kept nails, and the other that is making its presence known, a wiry clenching circlet of bones, it's a recollection, that's all. A knowing, an experiencing, a door shaken loose in his meticulous library of horrors, the statement of Juan Carlos Santibañez brought into waking. Fingers worn to muscle, matted with filth, bloody from where they've been digging. 

In the dark, under the covers, the sound is the shift of grave soil, of pressing earth, but it is also Martin, ensconced in warm empty dreams, Jon trying to breath through his nose and not wake up, and it can be all of these things at once. 

Martin's arm, and the hold of this grave-bound creature croaking with a dessicated throat at his neck – Juan Carlos, who had always been so frightened of closed spaces even before the cave-in, who saw the open casket funeral of his aunt when he was nine and never forgot how snug and restricting the space inside looked – pulls him closer. 

Jon is rattling out a breath, moving away sharply, sitting up and letting the brunt of the cold air shock into him. 

There is the creak of hinges being locked, the grunt of wood being lowered below. 

There is the creak of weight shifting on the mattress, the grunt of being pulled unceremoniously into wakefulness.

“Jon? What is it?”

A warm hand – human, covered in skin and not dirt, which has never clawed at the earth like a trapped beast – touches his elbow. Jon gasps out a sound, and the statement of Juan Carlos Santibañez, regarding an accident at work, given August 13th 1998, is on his tongue, behind his teeth – _I was doing some construction work,_ he had started, haltingly, unsure as the compulsion to tell worked into him, _and at the time, you know, there was nothing odd about the job, looked legit enough..._

The hand moves away but only slightly. The world flattens close like pressed flowers. Jon reaches behind him, takes the hand he knows will be there. 

“The Buried,” he says. 

“Ok,” Martin says behind him – and Jon thinks, _he will be so tired in the morning_ and so he says with soil still coating his teeth: “It-it's fine. Honesty. I'll be – go back to sleep.”

“Idiot,” Martin says kindly, and he squeezes Jon's hand before he lets go, and then he's getting up, grumbling at the cold, and the bedside light is flicked on, throwing shadows against the painted walls of the bedroom The heat is beginning to dissipate, goosebumps beginning to rise up the scarred skin of his arms. 

A glass is being pressed into his hand. 

“Here,” Martin says, and Jon takes it dutifully. It's cold, almost painful against his teeth, but it washes the silt and grit from his mouth, his throat. 

“Thanks,” he says croakily. 

“You want to talk about it?”

Jon puts the glass down on the bedside table. Turns and looks at Martin, pillow lines on one side of his face, hair corkscrewing wildly. Sleep-dark eyes finding Jon's, waiting patiently for the answer. 

“Not really,” Jon says, and Martin nods and doesn't ask further. 

Jon lies back down, in the impression his body had made that still clutches some lingering warmth. Martin draws the covers back over them.

“Light on?”

“I- I think it'll be alright.”

Martin leans out and clicks the bedside light off. Jon can no longer see Martin except for a faint outline, but he knows he's still looking at him. 

“Sorry for waking you up,” Jon says, and he feels rather than sees Martin shake his head. 

“Don't be daft,” he replies, and there's a half-yawn in his voice. He'll drop back to sleep quickly, Jon knows. Will try and keep his eyes open, knowing it will take Jon longer to shift back to himself and only himself in his head. 

Martin does not go to embrace Jon. They've done this enough times to know it will make Jon's skin itch, and his breathing quicken. But he puts out a hand over the space between them, and Jon takes it, grounding him slightly. 

Martin is soon breathing heavily again. Jon lies awake, feeling the hand in his own, the sensations of dirt and earth and damp tightness replaced gradually by the thick heat of the bed, the sweat building at the back of his neck, the way Martin is gradually shifting over to Jon's side of the bed and starting to snore. 

And eventually Jon will roll over to meet him, press his face against Martin's throat and coil their legs together. Alone in his head again, the unbidden knowing stored and locked away. Falling asleep, too hot, comfortable and relaxing back into sleep. Thinking empty tired thoughts about nothing at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cws for descriptions of concepts associated with The Buried (claustrophia, being trapped, lots of dirt, etc).


	7. in the lonely, hugs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> sometimes you need to write about hugging and that's ok.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mild spoilers for 159, no cws apply.

Of course it's something Martin's thought about.

Jon is raw-boned. Pinched at his cheeks, gaunt at the diving ridges of his collar bones, even before his diet shifted to the more unconventional. He is not the sort of man anyone else has tried to write poetry about; he's not savage enough for the Romantics, and Jon has always been too _present, _too much himself, too striking for Symbolists, in the same way a dropped glass, an unexpected word, a treasured thing broken gathers the rest of the world to its intensity. Jon's always been the most _real _person Martin's known. Martin gave the attempt at linguistic recreation his dawn-tussled thoughts more nights than one, labouring while living in the squashed temporary camp of the storage cupboard, but the words dripped from him unwilling, baulking at being written, and eventually he surrendered that too.

There is something scarecrow about the Archivist, face turned to the elements, arms outstretched, sackcloth skin poorly knitted to his structure. There are things that you assume, faced with an image like that.

Martin has devoted hours to considering the blueprint of the reality he knew impassible, bathed in guilt and shame and frustration at his inability to take this infant love, a mewling blind thing that could so easily swell to maturity if nurtured, dash it from its cot, starve it out until it withered back into the harsh ground it sprung from so ill-timed and ill-advised.

And yes, Martin thinks, half-stoned on a rushing wind-tunnel high of _touch _and _sense _and _warmth, _he was right to imagine in that locked-off sepulchre of his mind that Jon's skin would be chilled. Would gather little heat to it, and there is something sun-starved and day-sapped in its sensation against Martin's own exposed flesh. But then that might be the ravenous gulping cool of the beach, might even be a reiterating echo chamber of sensation mimicking Martin's own skin, salt-dusted and chapped with the coarse vacant, roughed up like headland ground by the sea air.

He was right to imagine that Jon's hold, when it's bestowed with barely a breath of a pause – _so entirely, like they both have not surpassed and surmounted their own battlegrounds to make it this far – _is a sharp, knocking, biting one. His knees drop, bash imprints like fists into the sucking water-logged sand, and his body pitches forward, unbalanced and falling anyway, and his hands pluck at Martin's mist-damp sleeve, his fingers cramped and spindly with a wasting thinness, his joints gripping and pricking like thorns.

But then, Martin thinks as his world rediscovers colour, he thinks _oh. _

Because here, he was wrong. Jon's arms go around him, and there is nothing tentative, soft-shoed, there is no awkward displacement holding him slightly at a distance. Jon's arms go around him, and he – his body unfolds against Martin's. There is much too much of him, a surge of all-at-once motion and Martin feels like splintering, and he gasps, feeling the shock of sensation returning, painfully prickling over his leaden flesh. He thinks of pulling away, his muscles even jerking, a practise motion intended to devolve into a real response, even as his body coils animal and instinctive towards the gesture, returns it slapdash but in kind.

An imperfect copy. Martin's taut arms have forgotten how the action works. And maybe he was wrong before as well, because Jon is _warm, _a pyre of a man who is resting his forehead on the nook between shoulder and neck, who is perhaps shaking, or maybe Martin is or perhaps now they're both so close it doesn't really matter. A man he doesn't think he really knows at all, whose capacities have been underestimated even by him, this man is holding him tightly, as Martin kneels, saturated in the swelling rising wave that this desperate feverish kindness is churning in his soul. Overwhelmed by such surety in this bird-boned softness, a softness Jon can not and does not give away as easily as he is doing so now.

Martin did not expect such a grip. Each of them anchored to the other, limbs compacted against each other like snow moulded into shape.

It's a nice thing, he thinks distantly, to be wrong about.


	8. after the end of everything

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jon breaks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set immediately after episode 160. Some cws in the end notes.

Under the watch of that terrible sky, Jon crumples like something demolished.

Martin catches him. He always will, he remembers thinking.

Arms out like barriers, bundling their bodies into synchronicity, of both of them reaching out for the other. Martin's arms shrouding him in the grip of limbs. Jon's manic laughter is declining into a frenzied wailing. There are words in there somewhere, Martin thinks, wreckage of language washed away by the deluge of desolation cascading out of him.

Martin attempts to shush him, because it's like a scream in an empty room, a misspoken word that turns a spat into something shocked and serious – Jon's so loud, so vocal in the threatening quiet of their lapsed world, and there are more things that could hear him than livestock and wildlife. They might be in danger and Jon's sound is a lighthouse foghorn, an incensed insensate outburst, and if something hears him, Martin will not be ready, Martin can't _protect_ them.

He tries to speak, frustrated at first, a wild alarm that flowers in his chest – he doesn't understand, what happened, what did Jon do? – trying to reason him down from the precipice of his grief – _Jon – just, Jon... it's, Jon... come on, I need you to – please, calm down, J-jon please_ but he doesn't think Jon is listening, can listen, so he crushes Jon against his chest so the sound is muffled against him, and he can feel it shake and shudder through his ribs, the intensity of it contained in such a small body. He lapses into his bewildered attempts to reassure, to comfort. He doesn't know what he says exactly. It's meaningless, more babbling. Jon's adrift and Martin's trying to anchor him to land.

There's crusting blood pooled in Jon's ears, dried as it channelled down his neck. There's the smudged marks of red around his eyes, his throat; his teeth stained like he's sunk them into meat, scraps of flesh dug under nail. The handprint on his cheek is pink, almost quaintly ineffective. Martin reads the scattered evidence of thwarted violence on Jon's body and feels sick.

They don't have time for this. The cutting chill of the outside is sidling through the smashed window. The audible landscape of the outside is a groaning, wrenching of a broken earth, and they are not safe. But Martin holds Jon for such a long time as he exorcises sound from soul, trying to quieten his hysterical howling against his coat, muddy from when he slipped, running back to the house as the sky opened its lids and blinked. Jon churns out brief interludes of almost incoherent vocabulary – _Martin_ and_ all of it_ and _sorry_ – and these landmarks of words never coalesce into meaning, cycling and cycling and cycling until they rust into exhausted sobbing.

It's too much. It's noise and light and rumbling earth and Martin cannot fix these things. He draws himself into a numb cloak of narrowed focus, because he can't, he just can't think about the things outside, the scope of their world gone rotten, how anything could get in.

For the moment, as usual really, Jon has the entirety of his attention.

Jon's crying sluggishly atrophies into mute hiccuping against Martin's coat.

“Jon?” he asks, tentatively, frightened, and finally, finally he is looked at.

The skin around Jon's eyes is puffy, splashed with a hideous artwork of blood and tears. One of his pupils is splayed wide, unnaturally dilated, the white corrupted in coagulated dark shapes from where the blood vessels have burst. The other eye that meets Martin's is dull, empty.

“Jon, can you – _talk_ to me. What – I don't understand, w-what... what happened?”

Jon opens his mouth to speak, and the voice that spills from him is wrong.

“_...and when he came at me, his bared teeth fetid with the meat he'd already torn from my leg, I brought the hammer down, caving in his cheek, and my blood, it sang..._”

Jon clamps his trembling hands over his mouth in a sparking tumult of horror. He tries again, and Martin watches his mouth try and force his name and he gets a mangled _Mar_.... before the words are being thrown up out of him like a sickness, like an invasion, his low voice pitching high and off.

“..._Francesca stood in the doorway, and she didn't, she didn't move towards me but her shadow poured into the room like spilled water and I tried to scream..._”

Jon sobs and slams his hands over his lips again, mushing the sound under his palm for a moment, shaking his head fiercely as though he can dispel the sentences that are jostling eagerly in his throat.

“Are those... Jon, are those _statements_?” Martin asks, his voice going squeaky – _what more_, he thinks, _what else can this world give them?_ And that dull pupil now shot with panic meets Martin's gaze. Lowering his hand, face scrunching up again in bottomless despair, and he mouths the shape of words that it takes Martin a moment to understand, _I can't I can't I can't._

Martin doesn't understand he's watching an Archive lose control. Panicked and overwhelmed. Not yet.

“R-right,” he stammers. “Right I'll just... Right.”

Jon doesn't need his blathering. Jon can't do anything with his panic. He's falling apart, falling in on himself, and he needs someone to pull him out.

“Right,” Martin says. “J-just... don't speak, OK. Not... not right now. Can you... OK, take my hand, Jon ok?” He offers out a broad palm and Jon practically grabs it, “Squeeze once for yes, two for no. Can you do that for me, Jon?”

_One._

“Alright. Ok. We're going to.... Can you... sense or whatever, is – is anything coming for us?”

_Two._

“Are we safe here?”

A pause, then a squeeze. Less strength in it.

Martin nods.

“That'll have to do.”

Jon's hands are beginning to violently shake. Sitting mute and coated in blood, and outside the unforgiving sky watches them.

“Can you stand?”

Jon shakes his head, so Martin helps him up. It takes a flash second before his limbs cave back down, coltish and stumbling and nearly pulling Martin back with him.

“Oh shit... ok,” Martin yelps. “Ok. I'm going to... I'm going to lift you, alright?”

Jon doesn't protest. Maybe he's got no fight left in his bones. Disentangling their hands, Martin leans down and scoops him into a secure grip. Turning his back on that horrible gaze, on the open wound of the broken window, taking them further into the house to the windowless box of the bathroom, sitting Jon down on the closed toilet seat. Martin flicks the feeble lock on the door and knows it won't stop anything that really wants to get in.

Jon sways like a listless drunk where he sits. Martin runs the tap, and there's still hot water in the tank from this morning – _Jon had hummed in the shower, a jaunty little tune like a folk song, and Martin had listened and smiled as he buttered the toast_. Jon won't stop looking at Martin, as he dampens the washcloth with warm water, starts to clean away the scabbing blood from Jon's face, but that brings no comfort – he tracks the movement as though on a delay, as though he isn't really seeing Martin at all, just reacting to the motion.

In and out of the warm water he dips the cloth, and slowly the porcelain of the sink stains pink.

“What happened?” Martin asks quietly as he dabs at Jon's neck, his ears, his cheeks, and Jon opens his mouth, pauses, and then closes it again, pressing his lips together like he's locking the sound in.

“We can fix this,” Martin says to fill the silence, the guilty weight of it. “We – I don't know how, but we can... This wasn't – this wasn't your fault, Jon.”

Jon takes a while to hear this. He rouses like a sleeper, and shakes his head fervently, his expression painted anguished for a brief moment. And Martin doesn't know what he can say to that.

Jon starts to slump forward as Martin begins to clean his hands. Eyes fluttering, bobbing back into wakefulness with a start that looks painful.

Martin doesn't know what time it is. His watch presents a different answer every time he looks. Jon is exhausted, has been carved out and hollowed by whatever has been done to him, and whatever they're going to do next, Martin can't do this alone.

“Come on then,” he says with a gentle sigh, and he's already lifting Jon back up.

He puts him to bed. Takes off his shoes and places him under the covers and Jon's hand goes gripless in his hold within moments. His dark skin still ashen but his face slackening into something that could possibly be a momentarily respite.

Martin needs to do something. His hands itch, and he picks up a knife from the kitchen because it makes him feel safer. There are things he can do now, and they go some way to assuaging the worry clotting in his chest. Locks the front door, drags the hallway table in front of it in a pitiful attempt at blocking. He closes all of the curtains, worries that he can do nothing about the shattered window.

On his mobile, there's no signal. Not that there would be some anyway. He's not even sure who he could call. The radio when he turns it on briefly is an ominous flat line of dead air. It's just them, he realises dully.

The paper that Jon was reading is on the floor, fluttering from the buffet of wind.

Martin has to sit down to read the awful missive from Jonah Magnus. Who finally got what he wanted. Who used Jon to do it.

Jon who will in all likelihood never forgive himself.

There will be a tomorrow for both of them. Jon will wake up, damaged but alive and there is food in the house, but some of it won't keep in the rapidly warming fridge. Martin knows with a certainty that they cannot stay here. That if they want to continue having tomorrows, they'll have to leave this den, this island of something like peace that they were allowed for such a short time.

Martin packs two backpacks with the essentials they have. Carries them with him into the bedroom, props them by the door he quietly locks. He goes and sits by Jon's side in a plush chair made with a smaller man in mind. Jon sleeping like a corpse, drained and unhappy even in sleep. Martin catalogues the marks on the Archive Magnus sought to compile on the body of one shattered man. The chronicles that he has witnessed, survived. The number of scars he suffered alone, cornered and in pain and thinking he would die.

Jon's not alone now. And whatever Magnus has done, Martin doesn't know if he can fix, if it can be. But he has to start small. Fix what he can, protect what he's able to.

Martin clutches the knife in his sweaty palm, and waits for Jon to wake up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cws for blood, implied violence


	9. the stranger

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tws and cws for this in the end notes

Martin shivers, a whole body shudder that gallops through his system as the sleeping bag is unzipped. The backdraught is ungodly and he groans vocally as the movement allows a Baltic gust of air to infiltrate the confines previously occupied by the muggy sleep-thick warmth he's been slathered in.

“Christ, Jon,” he complains, trying to yank the material back around him, giving it a bit of a petty tug on his quest to return to the dozy weight of almost sleep he was happily bubbled in.

“Oh hush. It's not that bad,” Jon replies in a grumbling rhythm, showing no remorse, the arse, and Martin winces and hisses like he's been caught by spitting oil as Jon's frigid ice-cherished body curls around him like a bracket. He snuggles in like he's trying to unsuccessfully burgle his body heat, knees pressing into his back. Martin kicks him with a double-socked foot to complain at this flagrant abuse of privileges.

“Nothing out there?” he mumbles into the angled pillow of his own arm. Thought Jon would be up for a while yet with his thoughts, on his usual pretence of 'checking the perimeter'.

“All quiet,” says the stiflingly-close bundle breathing into the back of his neck, making the skin feel sweaty with condensation. Martin stretches out a little before coiling up again, feeling bony fingers clench at his hips before encircling his waist like a particular committed lock.

Martin doesn't say anything else. The warmth wreathes about his limbs. The small fire they're letting die for the night is still warm enough to throw out a mild corona of heat.

Jon is apparently in a restless mood. His long hands and fingers tracing little idle circles like an spirograph at the skin he can reach. Martin's stomach, his pyjama-covered thighs, his hips, like he's trying to smooth the skin out.

“Would you settle down?” Martin says, mumbling, mildly grumpy. “Keep your hands to yourself.”

Jon's lips are at the curve of his neck, mouthing softly. Not even kissing, maybe he's too tired for it, just motioning his lips over the skin. He's a looming question-mark shaped man, towering over Martin by half a foot, poor posture giving him a natural stoop, and his hold makes Martin feel enclosed, bound up in the intimacy of the space.

“Sorry,” he says, without sounding sorry in the slightest, almost cheeky. He bestows another kiss that is not a kiss to Martin's neck, scraping a little with his teeth.

“Sleep,” Martin repeats, groggy but firm, and traps the soft, unblemished skin of Jon's hands in his own.

“Fine,” Jon still sounds inordinately pleased with himself, but he seems to calm. Burrowing himself so close Martin's running out of room. Arms grip around him, winching tighter.

“Sleep,” he parrots Martin.

Martin tries. Really he does.

Something is stopping him. Some sensation of calm let out when the cool air swept in. There's a prickling at the seat of his spine.

He fidgets a little, before he turns over, extricating himself from Jon's vice with difficulty, thinking that the change in position will improve things.

Jon's staring at him with a considering smile that curls the edges of his lips like the end of a spiral. They've a solar-powered camping light set up nearby, shaped like a lantern, stolen from a gutted B&Q, and the illumination begun to dim hours ago. Martin watches the artificial light highlights Jon's pale white skin, the upshot of scrubby blonde hair like sun-dried grass already sticking up at the back in a cowlick.

They're so close that Jon's eyes are crossing a little to look at him.

“They'll get stuck like that,” Martin chides roughly.

“Hmm?” Jon asks. He doesn't blink.

“Your eyes,” Martin repeats. “You keep them like that and they'll get stuck.”

There's a pause, and then Jon's eyes snap up to normal like they're elasticated, seated dead-centre as bullseyes. His face beams in a wide smile that rips up to the same level as his ears.

“You're so _funny_, Martin,” he breathes. Delighted, a childish light ringing in his big green eyes. “Tell me another joke.”

Something fizzes at the bottom of Martin's chest. He wonders if he's eaten something off.

“Errr,” he starts, and it's harder when he's just so close, so crowded up against him. “Jon?”

“Yes, Martin?” Jon replies. He says his name as though he likes how it feels in his mouth, the flavour of the sound, the way it travels down his throat. It's the same way he said it on their first date, when he introduced Martin to his parents, when they got married.

“Can you...” Martin tries to clear his throat of the stifling air. “In my wallet. There's something... something I found earlier. I want to show you.”

“A surprise?”

“It's your birthday soon,” Martin says – August, his brain supplies with a dull clunking mechanism of recollection – and Jon pauses a beat before his lips curl back four-fold like petals and he says happily, like he's touched Martin's remembered.

“Yeah. Yeah, it is soon, isn't it. I'd almost forgot what with everything.”

The cold air siphons in as Jon clambers out. Raking through the bags with his long bony fingers, before he gives a triumphant _here we are!_ and bounds back into the warmth of their cocoon, shivering from the chill, making an exaggerated _brrr_ noise. He passes Martin the worn-down wallet before burrowing up against his side, heated like a furnace as Martin flicks it open.

“It's a surprise,” Martin reminds him, and Jon whines good-naturedly, _spoilsport,_ but moves his head from where it lay on Martin's shoulder. Studies him unblinkingly with those eyes.

“Have it your way then.”

In the wallet section where he might have kept notes if paper currency still existed, Martin pulls out a folded paper. It crackles as he rights it into the bent photograph it is. Studies the fixed and frozen memory there; himself bundled up in two fleeces topped off with a cagoule slitted and damaged by unnatural rains, a slightly fire-singed bobble hat pulled down to smother hair that's been left alone to grow out into a frizzy unkempt afro, holding out the Polaroid camera at arms length to fit them both in frame. The thin-lipped but genuine smile of the man next to him, short, dark stubble maturing into the promises of a beard. Brown eyes faintly sunken, tired but happy, his arm anchored against Martin's. They took two pictures like this one, assurances, Jon had called them, and Martin knows Jon won't have it with him now if he asks to check.

Martin's hand doesn't shake. Doesn't look at Jon, at the man he went on a first date with to a pub where they had the football on too loud and someone was being rowdy at the fruit machine, and Jon ordered a whisky even though he told Martin later he hated the stuff, just wanted to impress him; at blonde hair he knows, has loved, has combed between his fingers while they've watched Jon's pretentious BBC Four documentaries; at green eyes he's seen sleepy and happy and angry and thrilled. Jon who is tapping his elongated fingers against the fabric of the sleeping bag almost impatiently, whose eyes are too yawning, too flattened for the well-boned structure of his face.

Martin has a knife in his pocket. He always has a knife in his pocket these days.

“Did you kill him?” he asks, almost breathless, more silent than sound.

“Hmm?” Jon replies, and Martin stabs him in the throat.

Jon skitters backwards out of the sleeping bag on legs that are fast becoming not. Cradling his throat, gargling out a confused_ 'Martin?'_ even as his eyes slide further down and off his face.

Martin's staggering up too, wondering if he has time to go for the cricket bat on Jon's side, the one he's abraded with roofing nails, the cross heads of screwdrivers. The knife feels too small in his fist and Jon looms, spine splaying out of his skin like a tent pole pushed through canvas, and he asks _Martin?_ even as he stretches as though rolling out dough.

“Did you kill him?” he repeats, and his voice does not, will not, tremble.

**<strike>_Martin,_</strike>** the voice strings out like a melted chewy sweet. The bars of confectionery that stuck in Martin's teeth when he was a child; the sound drags and droops and pulls and _echoes_ and it is not kind any more.

It reaches out again, and he thinks manically that it might be going to hug him when something hard and solid and remarkably identical to what a cricket bat decorated in roofing nails and screwdrivers might look like if someone swung it into marshmallow.

Jon screams and the sound _cuts_ and it swings around with a freakish rotating of its legs in time to be struck across the cheek, sending its nose and freckles and one side of its mouth slopping off to one side like a ship near cap-sizing.

“**Get down**,” Martin is told and he feels his body submit, drop and hunker down despite itself, and so he does not see what makes the thing that is not Jon howl like wind scratching at a windowpane, like a sound trapped between stations, doesn't listen to whatever wordless command is shouted that undoes it loudly and aggressively from its mockery of life.

“I – Martin,” comes the voice again. Unsure now. Braided through with worry and exhaustion. “Please, I'm sor- ….Y-you – you can get up now.”

Martin's body can move again. He stands, legs shaky, feeling like a nerves been trapped somewhere under the skin. The cold is pimpling the flesh of his arms. He observes the dark-skinned, dark-eyed man in front of him. Cricket bat painted with gore along with the front of his coat. Martin doesn't let go of the knife, and the man doesn't ask him to.

Martin holds up the picture. Compares the awkward smiling man of his photo, lower half of his face almost lost to a thick scarf, pock-mark scars trailing over his cheek and up to edge onto his forehead, to this midnight terror decked in the aftermath of violence. Panting, a large slash across his forehead like he's been attacked, the wound which even now is sucking closed.

The man doesn't move. Waits for Martin to bridge the gap. There are two sets of memories wedged and warring in his head, and both of them are so real and it hurts, rifling through stuffed in remembrances of weddings and birthdays and picnics, Jon drunk off cider and his serenading more like caterwauling; Jon ashen, a machine breathing for him, his skin splintered with the ricochet of masonry and plasterboard and foundation stone; arguing over money and house prices and their cramped flat in Dagenham; Jon, his trousers soaked and stiff with sea-salt as they tramp across an desolate beach; sleepily swaying against one another like tired skittles in a game of ninepins at their station as they wait for the early morning commuter train. And it's not, it's so_ real_ but it isn't, not all of them can be, not when the corpse of their architect is hollowed out and ripped up, the air of it hissing out underfoot.

Jon – Jon whose scars decorate him like medals, Jon who is holding himself like he's hurt, Jon who drops his bat in a heartbeat when Martin closes the gap and grabs him, trying to shake off the false memories like water droplets – Jon shivers like he's frozen, and his hold is a grasping gripping panicked action. _Martin,_ he says as though a placeholder to a hundred different things. His voice is low and raspy and ever so soft.

Jon, who is the realest thing Martin knows.

Martin holds him until he can trust in that again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not entirely sure how to tag this but better safe than sorry;
> 
> definite tws for body horror, violence  
cws for dubcon touching, memory alteration, mindfuckery, the Stranger as a concept generally.


	10. injury

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Martin should have said something. He knows he should have.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No tws or cws apply.

Martin realises that he's made a mistake in a sort of chronological tripodal structure of regret. 

Primarily, it consists of the dazzling moment when Jon – striding ahead, jaw set and trying to work out where they should have started to go up-hill from the out-of-date ordinance survey map clenched in his hands – suddenly stopped with all the forewarning of a stubbed toe. Holding a hand up to signal that there might be something up ahead in the foliage. Martin, committedly focused on regular breathing and maintaining his ongoing argument with his oesophagus about whether he's going to be sick or not, didn't dodge. Bashing the whole front of his body against Jon's backpack, the arm he's kept so industriously curled up against his chest knocked hard. He thinks he might have made a bitten-off shriek. That shining testament to his mistakes was compounded by his follow-up action, which was to collapse like a felled tree, almost taking Jon down with him, paying fervent and painful homage to the undergrowth with his face. 

Mostly he knows that he's really fucked up when he wakes up a few minutes later. Still lying on the ground, and apparently the tent sans-ground sheet has been abruptly set up around him like he's some sort of pop-up installation. The contents of the forest floor have made union with his now knotted hair, and it snags and tugs as he sits up. He can taste grit and dirt in his mouth and there's a stinging dampness on his upper lip. He blinks, coming to terms slowly, and it's then that he realises, just from a brief glance, that Jon is absolutely _fuming._

The backpack has been upended without much dignity, its innards rifled through viciously, a platoon of bandages and medicines hastily assembled and called to order off to one side. Jon is hunched, squatted over the spoils of his ravagings, his fingers gripping two packets of prescription co-codamol that they snaffled from a gutted Lloyds pharmacy near Glasgow, looking for all the world like he's trying to frowningly read their instructions like rune-stones. 

“J'n?” Martin mumbles blearily, and Jon looks over, a whiplash motion with all the focus of sunlight caught in glass. Once he's apparently satisfied that Martin isn't in any immediate danger, his glower returns like a storm front. 

He should have told him, Martin knows. He should have, he should have. It had been so fast, and it had hurt but it had been manageable and they'd escaped so quickly, he would have told him eventually, he would have. 

“Jon, will you...” he says, struggling to stand and failing rather dramatically at it. His apologies form a queue in his throat. “Will you just, Jon, come over here...”

Jon makes a harsh cutting gesture that rather obviously means _shut up_. He makes it again when Martin makes a token protest, and then – watching Martin's strenuous attempts to rise – forms another gesture and very clearly mouths the word _sit_. 

Jon doesn't talk much any more. Not after Jonah Magnus stole his words from his throat. He avoids anything that might be read as an instruction, a command, a question, which exhaustively limits most of his conversation. He doesn't need to say anything now, not at the moment because usefully he's being really fucking obvious. Stony-faced and cloaked in the miasma of his prickling temper. 

Martin flinches when Jon slams something. Jon stops immediately, has the decency to look shamefaced, if mulish, cooling his gestures into perfunctory and quiet actions that can't be read as threatening. He's letting his upset out like a bled radiator and Martin doesn't know what to do. 

He passes Martin a water bottle and two small oval tablets expectantly, but quickly realises his own stupidity and takes them back with a frustrated huff. Finally, finally, Jon stops pacing, stops _moving_, going to his knees and edging closer to where Martin's sitting to help him take the medicine. His rough dry-skinned hand set like a brace at Martin's neck as he carefully tips the water back against his lips for Martin to drink. After he's swallowed, his hand lingers, and after Martin's sheepish thank you, it tentatively moves to thread into the outgrowth of hair at the nape of his neck. 

“I'm sorry,” Martin says miserably, his arm now transitioning from smarting to a rather concerted throbbing, and he means it. “I – we needed to keep walking, and there was nowhere safe to stop yet and I know it was – I know I should have....”

Jon's hand has a tremor like a trapped nerve. Martin angles his head to look up at him, and there's messy furrowing tracks in the grubby dirt on his cheeks. 

“I'm sorry,” Martin repeats, and Jon's head makes port against his own for a second. 

“I thought...” comes a raspy, scraping voice, and Jon moves back to study him with wet eyes, and his face twisted in something pained. “I didn't know....”

He doesn't finish the sentence. He sucks in a steadying breathe that doesn't really help before he motions with his hand at the materials he's assembled like a medicinal hunter-gatherer. Martin understands exactly what he's not saying. 

“We can't just leave it?” Martin asks, already knowing the answer with dread making a kernel in his stomach. Jon presses his lips tight and shakes his head and looks as though he'd rather do anything else but this. 

To his credit, Jon's as professional and mercifully quick as can be expected. He cuts Martin's now swollen, bruise-bright arm out of his sleeve, padding the feverish skin with wadding and gauze without jostling it. He looks right at Martin and exaggeratedly demonstrates that it might be a good idea for Martin to copy his breathing, a deep in-and-out that Martin shakily joins in harmony with. Jon squeezes Martin's unencumbered hand that's hooking into a claw against his upper thigh before letting go. 

Martin's breathing staggers and slips over into ragged whimpering cry when Jon sets the splint snugly against the injured bone, tries to bury his wet, gasping face into Jon's neck as the stick is tied in place with shoelaces and strips of ripped-up t-shirt at the elbow and wrist. Jon is shushing him, running his hands up and down his back once it's done, his voice plugged up with apologises and despairing, Martin sniffling and hiccuping through the after-shocks. 

Martin begins to get drowsy after that, the codeine clearly sneaking into his system and blanketing him in a blissful muted haze, like someone's turned the sound down on the world. Jon takes his meek acceptance of further care as permission to fuss, and briskly rises to the occasion. He brushes out the leaves and small sticks from Martin's hair with a precise and focused intensity until the tangles meet with his internal satisfaction. Soaks a wash-cloth with the dregs of water from the bottle, cleaning away the dirt and small spots of blood from the minor scratches on Martin's face. A measured, stroking left-right motion that leaves Martin blinking heavily, content to half-mindedly watch a host of flickering expressions cross the pathways of Jon's face. 

When Jon's done, he looks solemnly over his handiwork like he's overseeing some great project, sealing the act with a dry kiss against Martin's cheek. 

“C'mere,” Martin slurs dozily, and Jon enfolds against him like two seas merging, careful not to knock his arm. The ground beneath them is chill, will turn frosty as it dips into nightfall, and they can't stay here, they've got miles to go before the nearest town, they're fast losing light. 

Martin tries to say this, or he thinks he does, but Jon shushes him again and kisses the space between left eyebrow and hairline, over the cuts on his cheek that have long stopped smarting. 

Jon doesn't tell him to rest. To close his eyes. Jon doesn't tell him to do anything these days, doesn't trust himself with it. But his body is still knelt down as a bedrock, and Martin thinks he might be rocking them both ever so faintly, his fingers trailing ouroboros maps into the weft of his newly combed hair. Martin takes it as permission enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [say hi on Tumblr!](https://bibliocratic.tumblr.com/)


	11. communicating

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They're getting better at it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A slight follow up to the premise set up by chapter 7, but it is absolutely not necessary to read that first. 
> 
> Post episode 160. No tws.

It's not easy, the slapdash and imprecise art of communication. Martin's never been particularly adept. His words trip over footholds of his own making on their way out of his mouth. He has a stammer he's never quite rid himself of, his words too earnest or too anxious to showcase any finesse at the skill. 

And Jon...

Well. Jon. 

It wasn't simple before, twisting the tape back to the start of all this, Jon talking like a car trying to jump start when things felt too personal, his indelicate sincerity that struck with all the tenderness of an anvil. And Martin likes to think they were both getting better, before. They had three weeks of stumbling, artless practise, their amateur declarations witnessed by no-one but the wind and evening-dappled fields that stretched like lazy days for miles around. 

And now. 

Martin wouldn't say Jon's up to managing much talking now. 

Oh, he's not silent. Chatty in his own way, and the conversations they have are tug-of-wars, teasing, testing to find the edges their pieces slot into. 

Easy isn't the word for it though. Martin supposes, it was never going to be. 

They've stopped for a few days to gather themselves. They've made it as far south as Melrose on the borders, and it would have been a pretty market town, antique fairs and village fetes and a eye-catching ruin of a fourteenth century monastery, if the Hunt hadn't passed this way, maybe the Spiral too. There isn't much left here in the way of civilisation, and little to nothing in the way of humanity. There are shadows like the imprints on wall after the outpouring shock of a bomb, but their limbs do not concede to the shape of limbs. They sway as leaves on a branch, like they're hanging from where their feet are stuck to the ground, and Martin tugs them clear of their gathering places.

They've managed to let themselves into the half-unhinged door of a little high street shop that used to sell fancy card and stationary. They had tried an art gallery further up the road, but the Dark had started to take root there like black mould, and it'd eaten away the ground floor to yawning inky nothing. 

Martin asks Jon if they'll be safe here, and Jon rallies himself wearily, Looks. He replies that nothing will come for them, and that's as much as they can ask for these days. 

Above the shop, accessed via a back-room still plugged up and packed with unopened boxes, up carpeted stairs on which bundles of unopened notebooks and special occasion cards balance committedly against the will of gravity, there's a small flat. The decoration in the flat is... interesting. It's more something one of Tim's friends would have had, the few times Tim got Martin to go out with him for one of his 'de-stress Friday' sessions. Martin would laugh at the wall-hangings like indoor curtains, the posters of the zodiac and some tie-dye hippy representation of chakras, the bong even still on the coffee table in the poky living room, except his attention is slightly more taken up by Jon at the moment. Leant against him like a downed tree, his eyes drooping closed and his legs fast failing him, shuddering from the effort of taking the stairs. 

The way here was treacherous. There's a town further north about forty miles swallowed by the Vast. Jon tries to avoid Seeing as much as possible, of course he does, and Martin will never ask that of him outright, never, but they've had to check if the way is safe a number of times. And each time he opens the door or whatever metaphor Jon uses to understand it, it drains something from him it takes a long time to claw back. 

Martin drops his backpack by the entrance. Divests Jon of his. Jon sways and blinks with lidded eyes, and his gestures are sloppy, poorly formed. Martin ends up carrying him to single bed off to the right of the staircase, the room still wreathed in the old stale smell of tobacco and weed. 

Once Jon's out for the count, Martin checks the doors, the windows, their rations and supplies with the religious militancy of a man who knows what happens when they don't. He counts out rations, makes careful notations in his notebook with a stubby pencil sharpened by his pen-knife. The cupboards of the flat are mostly a bust, but there's a few cans of baked beans, tinned peaches, and the delight of finding a single can of tinned custard, which Martin stashes to surprise Jon with later. 

There's a billy bookcase next to the non-functioning TV, crowded full of precarious piles of console game boxes and disordered books and back issues of the _Fortean Times._ Martin peruses through a number of books on mysticism, the paranormal and how one can access their inner self before he finds a glossy hardback on origami to entertain himself. 

The sky outside is dark and scratched with an ugly bruising colour, but it's likely to be only mid afternoon. Martin ventures back down the staircase and grabs some coloured card before he settles back into the spring-less corner of a battered settee draped with a brightly adorned throw blanket. There's another, equally obnoxiously shaded blanket of clashing colours, and he places it over himself and gets comfortable. 

It's a few hours later when he hears the bed squeak. A clearing of a throat, the unsteady padded steps of someone who hasn't found their equilibrium just yet. 

Jon pushes the door open with a sighing squeak and peers blearily around. 

The nap hasn't helped at all by the look of it. Martin turns mid-fold and gets to see a crime scene of disturbed sleep evidenced on Jon's body. One of Martin's long-sleeve t-shirts rucked up, the under arms and ring around his neck patched damp. His skin rippled with a thick sweat, hair coming wildly and carelessly from the band he'd tied it back in. He's rocking on the balls of his feet like he's still following the motion of running, and his eyes as he stares at Martin are unnaturally dilated, unnervingly steady even as he scrubs his face with his hand. 

“Hey,” Martin says carefully. Knowing to keep his voice pitched low, calmer than Jon feels right now. “Are you... everything ok?”

Jon pauses, blinks _just_ too slowly to seem natural, and shakes his head.

“What's wrong?” Martin asks. “If you can... if you want to say, that it.”

Jon pauses. It's habit now. A nervous tic. Mulling over what he wants to say and how he'll say it. 

He has to be so careful with how he says things. 

Martin's expecting a truncated gesture or two. A stumbling sign that Martin will have to parse, backed up by a thousand other signifiers of meaning in their home-spun language. But unusually, Jon clears his throat, bites his top lip anxiously before he opens his mouth. 

Like tuning in a radio station mid-programme, someone else's words ring out. 

“_I allowed myself some brief hope,_” Jon's voice sloshes out of his mouth with a South American cadence. “_that maybe he'd just left me, maybe he'd escaped with just a divorce. But no. One call to the housing association confirmed that, as far as they were concerned, I'd always lived alone._”

Most of the statements Martin doesn't recognise. He's not been cursed with an encyclopaedic knowledge of them after all, a forced and unwilling archive now capable of speaking in every voice but his own. They're all the same anyway. The recycling of other people's tragedies and miseries, their worst days committed for posterity and recited dutifully by the archive Jonah Magnus created to house them. 

Jon usually doesn't share the content of his dreams. 

“Nightmare?” Martin says, deliberately lightly. He puts down his truly butchered attempt to make a swan and watches as Jon swallows, brings a hand to his mouth to gnaw at a nail. 

He wonders if that's the right word, knows in his heart it isn't, not really. Because nightmares are a twisting of things that both are and aren't, a plaited deceitful recollection of an unkind brain. Jon's dreams are a hideous witnessing, with no hope of challenge of change. 

Jon jerkily nods, before he says in that awful ventriloquism:

“_... regarding a series of misplaced objects lost over the course of three months._”

Jon's started to rub his arms. His lips firmly closed again, as though embarrassed he's shared the history he's been watching in his dreams. But he did share it. And that's notable. 

Martin holds up a corner of the blanket on the settee, and chides “Get in here, or you'll catch your death”, and Jon's crossing the distance as though he was waiting for the signal. 

They don't say anything for the while. Jon folds himself up against Martin's side like a gangly greetings card, like one of his obviously failed origami projects. Martin puts an arm around his shoulder and consigns himself to the rather shocking robbery of body heat that's rapidly occurring. Jon accepts the arm, but the tension is still wound through his marrow, and he doesn't calm like he usually does.

“This one really bothered you, didn't it?” Martin says.

A twitchy up-down motion. 

“How come?” Martin asks, before: “If you want to talk about it. If not, well, I can tell you all about my grand adventures in paper folding. A wild ride, I can promise.”

Jon raises an eyebrow at the truly dazzling menagerie of wobbly animals, and huffs a stale laugh. 

He brings out his hands from where he'd buried them in the furnace of Martin's space, and makes a sign, a twisting hooked hand motion - _Spiral_. And then, shakier, flatter, his fingers closed like shutters – _Lonely_. 

“_As far as they were concerned,_” he repeats with a mournful and stolen tongue, “_I'd always lived alone._”

He makes a sign again, and meets Martin's eye like he's been trying not to – _Lonely._

Jon reaches out, and like setting fingers to the board of a violin, delicately fits his hand against Martin's. Like he's memorised exactly the places where they go, the coves and shorelines where their islands can align. 

Martin's grip has never been as careful. His fingers engulf Jon's smaller size, cushioning them in a sturdy grip. 

“You've not lost me,” Martin says, reading in between the lines of Jon's gestures. “I'm here, yeah? Alright. And we're together. I'm not lost.”

Jon makes a grunt of acknowledgement, inclining his head in agreement, impatiently, as though he knows all this, like he begrudges being reminded. But clearly this knowledge hasn't stained every part of his waking yet, because there are tears slipping unwanted from his eyes and his hand grips Martin harder. 

His gaze flickers like a camera shutter from the floor and its foot-scuffed rug to martin, back and forth. Martin wishes, not for the first time, that Jon could just ask for what he wants. Could stop feeling like he needs to justify every out-reaching motion to himself, approaching physical affection like he's trying to do the cryptic bloody crossword. 

He's learning. They both are. 

“What do you want me to do?” Martin asks instead. 

Jon's eyes finally linger on him. Cheeks damp, eyes red. He removes his hand from Martin's grip like he's unmooring a ship from port. His next movements being planned behind his eyes. A methodical consideration of angle, of intent, of reciprocation that's as much caution as it is overthinking. Martin wonders sometimes whether this is the Jon he always was, or the Jon that's been made by this world and all that's been laid against him. Maybe it's one or the other or both, or maybe it doesn't matter much any more. This is Martin's Jon, the Jon that is, the one that is thinking about how he's going to place his limbs as though there's a wrong way to it, who will steady himself before he'll reach out. But who always does, eventually, in his own time. 

His arms encircle Martin's neck now. A pause, a release of air, before he's pulling back, fretting like something hasn't worked. But he clearly wants something, enough to push through his dissatisfaction, face folded in on itself unhappily before it sets in determination and then he goes for around Martin's chest, fingers steadying, finding their own bony handholds in the material of Martin's jumper. The right angles of his elbows, the washboard of his ribs felt under his shirt, they don't have any give and Martin shifts a little to ease the hard sensation of it, try and reorient them better. Jon picks up on this, already trying to shift again or perhaps even move away, and if his tongue could still form apologies, he'd be making them. 

Martin's arms come round decisively, closing the circuit of them. 

“Stop fussing,” he murmurs, and Jon quietens. Face against the round of Martin's chest, the hand that's not still gripped vice-like carefully combining through his damp hair. 

“This ok?” Martin says finally, wanting to know, wanting Jon to feel like he can tell him.

Jon lifts his head. Nods, brings their lips together for a skimming kiss, like he's sealing the sentiment. 

He shuffles his body so he's wedged next to Martin, taking up any crevice he finds. After a moment, pulling and positioning Martin's arm back over his shoulder, so it drapes heavy and solid and present. A lightness on his face that sleep couldn't achieve but a victory Martin likes to claim as his own every time. 

It is no hardship for Martin to understand every one of these expressions just fine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Statement taken from Episode 38 - Lost and Found


	12. bathtime

Jon's being a one-man percussion band in the kitchen when Martin gets back. Clattering pans and clanking bowls and cutlery and tugging open drawers. The house is wreathed in the smells of spices that set off a tingling heat at the back of his throat. 

The flavour is muted a little. Taste buds flat. The weather outside isn't dipping into single figures but it seems to have gotten under Martin's coat anyway, turning skin chilled and clammy. 

In the past, he might have considered that he was coming down with something. A mild cold, a bout of the sniffles combated with Lemsip and cough sweets. 

Martin knows a bit better now. 

He kicks off his shoes without undoing the laces, throws his rucksack down to join the pile. 

“That you?” Jon calls out. 

Martin moves on socked feet into the tiled kitchen. Jon's trying to stir at least three pans at once, and a great waft of steam from the oven plumes in the air to throng like dragon's breath as he opens it to peer at his creations. 

“Good day at work?” Jon asks, pecking Martin distractedly on the cheek before darting around him to stir something vigorously. 

“Hmm,” Martin says non-committally. In truth it was regular, and uneventful, but he felt the numbness start to seep in as he sat on the Tube. He worries his lip with his teeth, wonders if he should say something at all. And it's not bad, not as it can be, and maybe it will go away in its own time, maybe Martin can deal with it alone. 

But in the end, he comes up to wrap his arms bodily around Jon, his face smushed into his loose-hanging hair, pungent and twisted up with spices. 

“You alright?” Jon asks, stilling for a moment, stopping to touch at the arms that have encircled him to try and ground themselves. 

Martin doesn't answer for a moment. The kitchen is heavy with steam, he knows, not fog. It's a hard lesson to remember sometimes is all. 

“A bit Cold, I guess,” he replies quietly after a while. 

Jon knows what he means. The flat's a balmy mid-twenties in comparison to the mild outside, but that's not what he means. 

Jon's hands pause before they run soothingly over Martin's exposed arms, and he turns to return the grip tightly, a haven of warm present body, before he pulls back, touches his palm against Martin's cheek briefly. 

“I'll run a bath,” he says decidedly, and his eyes catch Martin's with the steadiness of waves and do not falter. 

He angles his body around, briskly flicking the heat down on what was probably going to be their dinner, moving the pans off the heat so they don't burn. Whatever is in the oven clearly needs longer, because he rakes his eyes over it dismissively. 

“Unless you're hungry, first?” he asks, looking back. “It's nearly ready if you do.”

Food sounds nice, but only objectively, and Martin's already shaking his head in answer. There's a warning mutedness beginning to carpet the bottom of him, a dim night held back by the beacon of Jon's gaze. The fog burning off slowly. 

A nod, like Jon had expected it. And this has not been the only night like this, so maybe he did. 

Jon enfolds their hands together. 

“Come on,” he says. His voice is kind, and that's never died, no matter how the world bricked it up and starved it of sunlight. Jon's kind to his bones, and it wells up from the deep down of him. 

Jon pulls the way, and Martin follows behind. 

Martin sits on the closed toilet seat while Jon runs the bath. He sets his palms against his knees like he's trying to trap the vestiges of heat Jon left. 

Jon will return, he knows. It's difficult, sometimes, to remember that. But Jon showed him that. Showed, he supposes. The constancy of this hard-won fellowship. 

Jon approaches this preparation like he approaches cooking – a slapdash impatient alchemy where he adds things too soon because he can't bear to wait, dropping in whatever he unbottles, sniffs with a curious 'hm' as though he wants to see what will happen. 

The bathroom mirror fogs up, but it's a tight close warmth, and Jon chatters away. Not expecting Martin to respond, aware that it's an ask of him at the moment but nonetheless leaving little doors in the conversation by which Martin might enter. 

He splashes water onto his own shirt while testing the temperature of the water. He grumbles, a heatless little _'for the love of...'_ that trails off as he tries to twist the worst of it out, brow creased. Martin studies him, and a smile touches the corners of his lips at the sight. 

Finally, Jon pronounces it ready. Martin stands, goes to take off his shirt but Jon bats his hands away, says '_Honestly_, would you stop fussing and let me take care of you?' with a teasing rhythm, words furrowed into familiarity by time. Martin, recalling the lines of his role going rusty in his throat, pretends to roll his eyes, mutters '_Fine_' like it's the greatest of burdens, and he's rewarded by the flickering delight of Jon's smile. Something is beginning to thaw at the base of him. 

If that didn't work to banish the shadows in him, the bathwater does. Jon, apparently formed of some volcanic rock and uncaring of lesser mortals who don't take such joy in _heat_ as he does, has drawn the bath far too hot. Even when they cool it with lashings of cold water, Martin's skin is still prickling pink and near-scalded as he gets in, folds his too-long legs in the space to fit. 

Things start to unwind inside him, and he hums. Jon looks ever so smugly pleased at such an indicator of success. 

“I'll be back, just a minute,” he promises. He touches Martin's shoulder, and the contact leaves an equally scalding heat as the water. 

Outside the bathroom, Jon's doing something in the kitchen, making his usual racket, before Martin hears footsteps across the hallway to their bedroom. 

Martin splashes idly for a while. Messing with the bubbles – too many as usual. The heat makes his head muggy and unspooled, but it is not muted, not with the sounds of life from the rest of the flat. The slosh and fizz of over-bubbled bathwater. It is not lonely. 

Jon returns quickly, opening the door and closing it again to shut them inside the sauna they've made of their small bathroom. He's removed his socks, replaced jeans with pyjama shorts, and he goes back to the cabinet over the sink, drawing out bottles like potions from a magician's cabinet, soaks and gels and shampoos and scents, discarding a great number with a dismissive clatter. 

“You can be a bit louder,” Martin mumbles. “I think downstairs might not have heard you yet.”

Jon doesn't give him a response except for a haughty 'humpf', and Martin buries his smile in the bubbles. 

It crosses his mind, a stray knifing chill of a breeze to apologise, for all this fuss, for needing this; surely Jon must be hungry, he must have made plans that Martin wouldn't have derailed if he'd grit his teeth and gotten on with it, surely this is asking too much....

Those aren't his thoughts. It's easier to see the barbs they try and snag against his mind. He knows what Jon will say to any voicing of them, and he knows that they're not worth listening to. 

He sinks a little lower under the water and allows himself to be taken care of. 

Jon doesn't even hiss when his feet splash into the water, the salamander. There's a short ledge by Martin's head, on the opposite end to the taps where bottles usually throng and spawn, where Jon always leaves the empty ones for Martin to find and grumble at. Jon's shifted them so he can sit there, his potions in close reach. He's brought a plastic jug, and he positions himself so Martin's head is framed by his lanky worm-scratched legs. 

“Any requests?” he says, his fingers threading and fiddling with the coils of Martin's hair, tussling it indulgently. Martin tilts his head back so he sees Jon upside down, and sleepily mumbles a no. 

Jon rolls up his sleeves, leans down with obvious difficulty to press a close-mouthed kiss to Martin's crown. 

“The works then, I think,” he responds, and no more is said. 

Jon hums while he works. Old and sad songs that rise and coil and spiral with the rising heat. 

Martin falls asleep in increments. Eyes fluttering heavy and hooded as Jon massages and lathers a cedarwood scented shampoo into his hair, limbs softened to immobile by the water as he carefully washes the suds out with water, hands on his face to shield his eyes. He's not sure how awake he is when Jon's hands starts to knead conditioner into his curls, paying devoted attention to every damp and tearaway lock. 

When he wakes, he feels the water lapping lukewarm around him, and Jon's shaking his shoulder a little. 

“Welcome back to the land of the living,” Jon says, and Martin blinks blearily. “How are you feeling?”

Martin pauses before he replies. He used to say 'fine' or 'ok' automatically, like a gag reflex, learned by rote and dutifully doled out, but he's getting better, he thinks, at expressing what he feels. 

“Wet,” he replies finally, and Jon's brow crinkles in confusion before he sighs at the soft, teasing tone, still muddy with stupor. 

“Out then, funny-man, before you start pruning,” he replies. It's a little too late for that. The ends of Martin's fingers have scrunched up at their ends with the damp. 

Jon bundles him into one of the thickest towels that he clearly put on the radiator to heat, uses another scraggier one to scrub at his hair to get most of the water out. Martin mostly stands, feeling just a little overwhelmed, stupefied by the steadfast weight of Jon's affection. And he's not Cold, not even in the slightest; the Lonely's an old refrain too distant to hear, not with Jon reminding him so completely that he's loved, and cared for. That he's allowed to have this.

Jon presses a kiss to his cheek like he's signing off his work, then leans in for another, slower one. Martin returns it sleepily, his limbs heavy and body leaning in, but his face caught by a smile. 

Jon holds up the weight of him like it's nothing at all.


	13. reclaim

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is technically a sequel to the angsty premise set up in [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21736948/), but you don't need to read it. 
> 
> tws in end notes

[CLICK]

JONAH MAGNUS  
[_mid-conversation_] …. rather find they show up by themselves. A curious if harmless side effect, I wouldn't pay them much mind. Unless you'd rather this little interruption was kept from him...?  
  


MARTIN  
[_shortly_] I don't really care.  
  


JONAH MAGNUS  
How boorish. Peter didn't do much in the way of teaching you any manners.  
  
  
MARTIN  
He didn't teach anything worth listening to.

  
JONAH MAGNUS  
Oh, you were already an adept student of the Lonely before Peter decided to make you part of our wager. [_as though noticing _something] Forgive me. Would you like to sit down? Plenty of room at the table as you can see. I was just finished eating.

  
MARTIN  
No.  
  


JONAH MAGNUS  
Pity. I do relish the opportunity of a good conversationalist. My present company... as you can see, he's not exactly been up for chatting recently.

  
MARTIN  
[_ignoring him, the steady tread of footsteps closer_]  
  


JONAH MAGNUS  
If you aren't going to be a hospitable guest, I think that's close enough. I'm sure you understand.  
  


MARTIN  
[_stops walking_] You're not surprised I take it?

  
JONAH MAGNUS  
To see you here? Not especially. I knew you'd end up here eventually. All brash, full of foolish righteous anger masquerading as justice, bolstered up on thoughts of my murder.

  
MARTIN  
Read my mind, did you?

  
JONAH MAGNUS  
Oh, I didn't think I needed to for that one. You can be very possessive about what you consider yours.  
  


MARTIN  
Jon's not mine. He's not _yours, _he's not anybody's.  
  


JONAH MAGNUS  
Jon hasn't been his own man for such a long time.  
  


MARTIN  
You're wrong.  
  


[_a lull in the conversation, an impasse both are too proud to cross_]  
  


JONAH MAGNUS  
[_deliberately, aiming to hurt_] …. You can look at him, you know. See him alive, whole. But you won't, will you, or can't. Too many eyes in his head and none of them the ones you hoped you'd see.

  
[_proud_] I've moulded him. Shaped his becoming. And I watch my ruined world thanks to the words I pull from his dutiful throat.  
  


MARTIN  
You _stole _him.  
  


JONAH MAGNUS  
It was a fair trade. I took nothing that wasn't offered. And he pleaded _ever_ so movingly for your life.  
  


MARTIN  
[_biting_] And you're such the bleeding heart.  
  


JONAH MAGNUS  
It was a business transaction. A life for a life.  
  


MARTIN  
This?! T-this is no life!  
  


JONAH MAGNUS  
Not as you would understand it. Oh, but, look. _Look _at him, Martin. Isn't he magnificent?

  
[_a_ _roiling rumbling background sound of static_]  
  
MARTIN  
[_whispered, almost fearful_] Yes.  
  


JONAH MAGNUS  
_My Archives.  
  
_

MARTIN  
[_rallying, shaken_] I – Jon – Is.... is he gone?  
  


JONAH MAGNUS  
By which you mean, have I killed him?  
  


MARTIN  
You know what I'm asking.  
  


JONAH MAGNUS  
And yet I rather think you've not quite considered how much of a question it is.

  
MARTIN  
[_sarcastic_] Why don't you enlighten me if you're in sharing mood?

  
JONAH MAGNUS  
The Archivist has been dead before, has he not? You held his hand and said your little prayers over him as machines kept his body breathing, but I'm sure we can both agree that's not really a life. Jon was offered a choice, and he chose to embrace what he was becoming over death.  
  


But the Jon who woke up is not the one who signed the contract to become my head archivist. Nor was that Jon the one who dragged himself and Ms Tonner out of the Buried. Nor, indeed, did any of those bear resemblance to the Jon who tore Peter Lukas apart to retrieve you from the Lonely. So many Jons, and maybe none of them still alive, none of them the man you want to find. Does that bother you?  
  


MARTIN  
I don't.... I'm not here to discuss the bloody specifics of being a person. I want to know if he's still in there. His... I don't know, his _choice, _his emotions, his feelings.  
  


JONAH MAGNUS  
Are you hoping to appeal to his better nature? How quaint. But to set your mind at ease, let me clarify that the role of Archivist would be poorly served by an unfeeling watcher. Jon's always had to, how did he put it, 'sit in his feelings'.  
  


No, Martin, he feels _everything. _My Archive is a repository of knowledge. A catalogue of horrors I can collect and sample and observe and store, and they are kept perfectly preserved for me.  
  
[_a lip-curling smile obvious in his voice_] Shall I have him tell you a story?  
  


[_the sound rises to audible, as though it's been playing the entire time but the volume has been turned down to a murmur. An inflectionless rote recitation, tinged with someone else's voice overlapping like twisted signals interjecting over a radio broadcast_]  
  


THE ARCHIVES  
… _and I was sure I'd told her to leave, and I turned around, ready to shout at her, to say anything if it got her to run, but the doorway grew toothed and grinning before my eyes and there was something broken-backed and crooked in that space where nothing should have been...  
  
_

MARTIN  
[_interrupting_] Don't make him do that.  
  


[_there's the harsh horrifying sound of a jaw clacking shut, and it mimics the snap of a pause button_]  
  


JONAH MAGNUS  
You always liked listening to his voice. When it was the two of you in the Archives, all those late nights, you could hear him through his office door, and it would make you feel like you weren't so alone. We'll listen in on another one, shall we?  
  


[_a faint choking jerk, like a leash being pulled too tight, another snap of a play button, the dialogue restarting_]  
  


THE ARCHIVES  
_[reciting flatly] … I had the oddest thought then_ _and even as I backed away towards the stairs, I started to get my phone out. The daft thing was...  
  
_

MARTIN  
[_recognising, voice gone sharp_] Stop it.  
  


THE ARCHIVES  
… _I wasn't even going to call anyone for help, I just wanted to take a picture of the thing. To prove to you that it happened – you're always so quick to dismiss these statements and I wanted proof for you....  
  
_

MARTIN  
[_cold _] You've made your point.  
  


JONAH MAGNUS  
I think so. And, remind me, what _was_ my point?  
  


[_silence except for Jon's now-muttered static. Careful listening and it's not static at all, but an unceasing recital of horror, statement after statement pouring from his mouth_]  
  


JONAH MAGNUS  
You come into my home clutching that knife with such intentions of bravado. I imagine you wanted to swoop in, rescue him. But I possess him in all the ways that matter. And you know, surely, that you aren't going to be enough to save him.  
  


[_Martin's breathing is harder_]  
  


I wasn't lying before. I have truly enjoyed your visit, you can be quite distracting company. That's been the whole point of this, hasn't it?  
  


MARTIN  
Wh – ?  
  


JONAH MAGNUS  
[_interrupting_] Who is in the house, Jon?  
  


THE ARCHIVES  
Martin Blackwood is in the dining room.  
  


JONAH MAGNUS  
[_indulgently, playing for effect]_ Who else is in the house, Jon?  
  


THE ARCHIVES  
[_a whirring, like the tape's stuck, the first sounds garbled, before a return to normal_] Basira Hussain and Melanie King are approaching the east wing. Alice Tonner is patrolling the grounds of the estate.  
  


JONAH MAGNUS  
You see? All the fear in this world and he can see all of it, every trembling terrified beat of a heart. You think they could approach unseen, hide when he can sense every firing neuron of their fear, the pulse and jump of their nerves? No one is fearless, not in my brave new world, and so he sees them all.  
  


I underestimated you once, Martin. I don't make a habit of repeating my mistakes.  
  


MARTIN  
I disagree.  
  


JONAH MAGNUS  
[_dismissive_] Oh do tell.  
  


MARTIN  
Why do you think I came here? Huh? Flimsy knife in hand, having to listen to your gloating.  
  


JONAH MAGNUS  
Likely a poor attempt at trying to draw my attention.  
  
  
MARTIN  
And why do you think Basira, Melanie and Daisy came here?  
  


JONAH MAGNUS  
To kill me, I should imagine.

  
MARTIN  
No.  
  


JONAH MAGNUS  
No?  
  


MARTIN  
All those eyes of yours, and they're always too busy focusing on what they shouldn't.  
  


JONAH MAGNUS  
Tell. Me.  
  


MARTIN  
No.  
  
  
JONAH MAGNUS  
I had thought to spare you further indignities...  
  


MARTIN  
[_almost scoffing_] Yeah, this sounds familiar.  
  


JONAH MAGNUS  
Mart –  
  


MARTIN  
How about no. H-how about not this time, how about you shut up for a moment?  
  


[_huffing sound, almost a disbelieving laugh] _It's just so – so easy to distract you.

  
JONAH MAGNUS  
Not much of a distraction if I know you're coming.

  
MARTIN  
Who said I was the only distraction?  
  


JONAH MAGNUS  
I –  
  


_[a small patter of careful footsteps across marble flooring, and then a grunt, a wet slicing noise that sickeningly sounds like metal through meat]  
  
_ _[Magnus howls in agony. His voice echoing like a wind tunnel, a guttural gusty howling of static, the scrape of a chair shoved back, cutlery and tableware disturbed and smashing]_

_  
[another grunt of exertion and someone hitting the table, silverware clattering, before a heavier slump of a body hitting the floor]  
  
_

MARTIN  
You have to...!  
  


GEORGIE  
I know! Just –  
  


[_sounds of a tussle for a few seconds, then a deep stabbing puncture, the noise like a punch. Magnus stops screaming_]

  
GEORGIE  
Now. Now it's done.  
  


MARTIN  
That is... eurgh, that's so nasty.

  
GEORGIE  
Let me have this triumphant moment, huh?  
  
  
MARTIN  
Yeah. Sorry. When you said what you were planning, I thought.... it was a bit more like popping a tomato than expected.  
  


[_pause, adrenaline fast breathing, the Archives' static_]  
  


He's... he's gone. Elias is really gone.  
  


GEORGIE  
Finally.  
  


Now, where's...? Holy f – Christ, Jon. Jon? Martin, is – that's not....?  
  
  
MARTIN  
What Elias left of him.  
  


GEORGIE  
What's – What's he doing?  
  


MARTIN  
[_darkly_] What he was made for. There's so many more statements to archive now. He's being kept busy.  
  


GEORGIE  
[_hand over mouth_] _God, _that's... Christ. [_despairingly angry_] I thought – I thought that would do it. That was the whole _point _of this, to get him back.  
  


MARTIN  
The point was to kill Elias. He's.... Jon's not tied to Elias, he's tied to the Eye.

  
[_creak of a door hinge, footsteps_]  
  


BASIRA  
[_getting closer, echoing slightly in the space_] He fell for it then?  
  


GEORGIE  
[_pulling herself back to the moment at hand_] Yeah_._ Too busy monologuing at Martin.  
  


BASIRA  
[_creeping closer, sucking air through her teeth_] Aim was perfect.  
  


MELANIE  
She got him? Right across his eyes?

  
[_Georgie makes a 'squish' noise as an affirmative_]  
  


Good. Fucker got what was coming.  
  


BASIRA  
There's still the matter of Jon to deal with.  
  


... Martin, you sure about this?  
  


MARTIN  
[_deep breath_] As sure as I can be.  
  


GEORGIE  
Can he... can Jon hear us?  
  


BASIRA  
The rest of us, more than likely.  
  


MARTIN  
[an agreeing 'hm'] He knew you were coming.  
  


BASIRA  
I'd accounted for that. But being to all intents and purposes 'fearless'? Your invisibility cloak worked on Magnus. As to Jon, no idea.  
  


MELANIE  
Look, we should hurry. Go, bring him back, Martin.  
  


BASIRA  
And if you can't...  
  


MARTIN  
[_sharper_] That's my call to make, not yours. We agreed.  
  


BASIRA  
[_a heavy pause_] Just don't stay in there too long.  
  


MARTIN  
Right. I'd... I'd stand back.  
  


_[there is a creaking static, like muted sound, a whip of rising wind. Martin makes a grunt of effort. Fading in to mix with the static is the rhythmic slosh of tide, the empty drone of wind over empty landscape.]  
  
_

_[a release of held breath]  
  
_

MARTIN  
[_almost wistful]_ Back again.

  
[_footsteps digging into sand]  
  
_

Jon? J-jon, we've... you're ok, Elias, he's.... I know this won't, it won't disconnect you from the Eye or anything, but you told me, you told me it was muted here.  
  


Give you some space, s-so you can come back. I know – I know you're in there  
  


_[a crunching chewing sound like a tape spool caught]  
  
_

_[a manic and aggressive fast-forward_]  
  


MARTIN  
Come on, that's it. T-Try and talk to me.

  
THE ARCHIVES  
… _she had shattered the glass of the horrid thing, its spindling legs made into a constellation of shards on the kitchen floor, but I couldn't move, I couldn't believe that it was over, not until there was a knock at the door. The police, finally. And even then she had to coax me to move, saying that it was finished, it was dead.... [cut off]_

  
MARTIN  
He – he's gone, Jon. Really gone, he can't... you don't have to fight him any more. [_a hopeful gasping exhale_] Yeah, that's... that's it... yeah I know it's hard. [_ harsh buzz of tape_] Look at me, come on, yeah, good, you're doing it. You're out, you're... you're free.

  
THE ARCHIVES  
[_a crunching whirr, then intoning, tainted with the over-lay of Magnus' intonation, smug and congratulatory_] _You do not administer and preserve the records of fear, Jon, _ _you are a record of fear... [a sickening buzzing, the sound of a tape recorder being forwarded_] ... _could be turned into a conduit for the coming of this – nightmare kingdom. Don't you see where I'm going...?  
  
_

MARTIN  
I – Jon, I don't understand.  
  


[_garbling rewind_]  
  


THE ARCHIVES  
_...A conduit for the coming of this nightmare kingdom.  
  
_

MARTIN  
[_softer, sounding closer_] He did that to you. He forced you to say those words. That wasn't... that wasn't you, that's not your fault.  
  


Look, we – that's why we need you back. We can, Jon, we can stop this – we've... well, Basira's got a plan, and it's a small chance, but we could, with you and Georgie, we could _change _something. But we _need _you.  
  


[_empty static_]  
  


MARTIN  
[_quieter]_ And I need you. I need you to come back.  
  


THE ARCHIVES  
[_wrenching, cracking, choked]_ Mar –  
  


[_buzz, like a fucked up tape that goes on for several seconds] … I tried to explain, but all I could manage to say to get through the shaking sobs was 'I love you'._

  
MARTIN  
[_throat tight_] Jon, fight this, you _can, _ come on...  
  


THE ARCHIVES  
[_a different recording tugged from his throat, a replication of Martin's own voice, shatter-hearted and Lonely, the faint echo of a hospital monitor_] _… but we need you, Jon. Please – just. Please.  
  
_

MARTIN  
That's – Don't, Jon. Don't use my voice like that.  
  


I'm here. We weren't just going to leave you to him. So how can I... How can I stop this, how can I help you?  
  


THE ARCHIVES  
_[rewind] Please.  
  
_

MARTIN  
I don't _understand_– I'm trying but... no, no, no, come on Jon, eyes on me, yeah, look back up, not....  
  


[_ripped and ripe with comprehension_] Oh.  
  


THE ARCHIVES  
_Please [rewind]._ _Please [rewind]_. _Please.  
  
_

MARTIN  
I can't. Jon, I –  
  


THE ARCHIVES  
_[more insistent] Please [rewind]._ _Please.  
  
_

MARTIN  
_[forcefully_] I won't be your murderer, Jon!  
  


I _won't. _ I'm sorry, but – [_makes a deprecating noise_] It's not even sharp. It was for show, all part of the act.  
  


[_moves in closer, tread of feet in sand_] Listen to me, Jon. I know. Sweetheart, I know. I know you're tired. I know everything, everything's wrong, it's been all wrong for _so long, _and there's only so much hope we can all bear. [_quieter, almost ashamed_] And we could stay here. It would be so so easy. Sit down together on the shoreline, let the fog take us.  
  


I've been thinking, you know. [_huff_] Yeah, dangerous habit. I've had a lot of... I've had a lot of time to think, about Magnus and his 'grand plan' or whatever. He chose you, and let every horrible thing out there have their own pound of flesh from you. And the statements, they feed on you too, don't they? You live this sick repetition of other people's horrors, and that feeds the Eye, but it's too much for you to bear. And Elias, or bloody, Jonah or whoever, even he wasn't sure you'd survive, even before all this mess happened. He wanted you hurt, and _scared _but he couldn't be sure it wouldn't kill you outright.  
  


[_static, unbroken_]  
  


I read the statements too. Elias was very keen on giving me [_dark laugh_] well, professional development while you were away. And if that wasn't... wasn't enough –

  
[_pause_]  
  


Jane Prentiss trapped and terrorised me in my home, and after that, Christ, all that time ago, it all just kept happening. The whatever-it-was that called itself Michael, I was in those corridors with Tim for _weeks, _and I've been, huh – if being pinballed between working for some – some evil eyeball and Peter Lukas doesn't count, I don't know what does.  
  


[_a low breath, gearing up. The static continues, an intent and intense sedateness_]  
  


I've got all of them now, isn't that right, Jon? Whether it's the statements, or workplace collateral, or even just living in this horrifying hellscape of a world. That's all of them, leaving their mark. And Elias, I think you knew, [_wry chuff_] or Knew probably, that he would have made me Archivist. If you didn't make it. 's why he agreed to let me stay behind, while you all went to stop the Circus.  
  


S-so my point is. I – I know. I know you're tired, I know you want this to stop. But we could end this, together. It's too much for you to take alone, s-so why don't you share it?  
  


[_gentler_] You don't – You've never had to do this on your own. An Archivist always had Assistants, remember.  
  


THE ARCHIVES  
_[a break in the static, like signal breaking in and out, a furious dip and rise of disparate statements] – And I told her no – […] He knew he could never ask that of – […] Please, please – [….]_ Martin – […] – _through the shaking sobs was 'I love you' – […...]  
  
_

MARTIN  
You're not alone. Not now, not before. If we're to have any chance at all, you have to let me help.  
  


[_a staticky buzzing, low breathing, the distant call of gulls_]  
  


Look at me, Jon. Yeah, all those eyes of yours.  
  


What do you See?  
  


[_the static rises like a wind swell]  
  
_

_[Martin gives an airless grunt_]  
  


MARTIN  
That's it.... [_gasp]_ Come on, Jon, let me in.  
  


[_Martin lets out a gasp that chokes into a clenched cry. He gags and swallows the sound, and it is dry and painful and crunching. The static over-washes the sound of the shore, and Martin starts making bitten-off hurt sounds, that soon devolve into screaming. This goes on for a long time._]  
  


[_He stops. The static stops_]  
  


[_The loud sound of something heavy hitting the floor, Jon's breathing suddenly audible, mixed with Martin's panting. The scrape of sand, someone moving_]  
  


JONATHAN SIMS, THE ARCHIVIST  
[_slurring and mumbled, his tongue numb and awkward_] Martin... Martin... are you...?  
  


MARTIN BLACKWOOD, THE ARCHIVIST  
[_sucking in a harsh breath_] Jon.  
  
[_muffled, like he's embracing someone, or being embraced_] Christ, thank god, Jon, you're ok, you're here, you're back.

[_even more muffled_] God, I thought I was too late.  
  


ARCHIVIST  
Are you – Martin, tell me please, are you...?  
  


ARCHIVIST  
I'm fine, I'm just... [_wincing groan_] It's just a lot.  
  


ARCHIVIST  
R-right. Breathe through it. Look... look at me, that's it. The rest of it, a-all the noise, it's background. That's all. It doesn't have to drown you.  
  


[_For several long moments, they breathe in tandem as Martin calms_]  
  


ARCHIVIST  
I could hear you. B-back with Jonah. It was all so loud but I could hear you.  
  
Thank you. F-for coming to get me.  
  


ARCHIVIST  
Well, Basira gave me two options so it was that or murder [_clearly responding to some visual expression_] I'm – I'm kidding. Of course I wasn't going to just _ leave_ you.  
  


[_a surprised noise_] Jon. Your _eye.  
  
_

ARCHIVIST  
What...?  
  


ARCHIVIST  
The left one, it's not... It's different, it's not like – it's _blue, _it's blue, did something go wrong, is it...  
  


ARCHIVIST  
[_ever so softly, clearly a page ahead_] Yours has changed too. Brown suits you.  
  


ARCHIVIST  
I – Oh. Right.

So we've both.... Yours and mine....  
  


ARCHIVIST  
I think so.  
  


ARCHIVIST  
That's.... that's crazy.  
  


ARCHIVIST  
Hmm.  
  


[_…_]  
  


[_thoughtful_] I forgot how quiet it was, here.  
  


You really think we can stop this?  
  


ARCHIVIST  
Basira seems to have a plan. You and Georgie, your abilities. And well, me to some extent now, I guess. It could change everything back to the way it was, now Elias has gone.  
  


ARCHIVIST  
What do you think?  
  


ARCHIVIST  
I think we can stop this.  
  


ARCHIVIST  
Then I believe you.  
  


Martin, what you did –  
  


ARCHIVIST  
Let's – We'll talk about it later. I promise. Once we're out of here. I'm... Today's been a lot.  
  


ARCHIVIST  
OK. That's – OK. You should rest, when we get out of here. It's – it'll take a lot out of you, in the beginning.

  
ARCHIVIST  
I'm sure Elias wouldn't mind lending us his rooms. Not like he can complain.  
  


ARCHIVIST  
We're in Jonah's house?  
  


ARCHIVIST  
Well. More mansion. It's so ostentatiously gaudy, you'd hate it. Bet he has four poster beds and framed paintings of himself all over the place.  
  


ARCHIVIST  
How charming.  
  


ARCHIVIST  
Hmm. Melanie's probably started on slashing up the fixtures.

[_quieter_] Come on, then. Let's get out of here. I know the way back.  
  


ARCHIVIST  
[_ever so softly_] I've never doubted it.

[CLICK]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw for Elias and his general brand of Eye-based horribleness (mind-control, dehumanisation); tw for discussed suicidal intention


	14. night-times, redux

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _'The question isn't fully born before Martin's heaving great waves of sobs into the chest he's pillowed on. Like clockwork, the arms come round, always an inch too tight a grip, and somehow that makes this easier to bear.' _
> 
> Martin has nightmares, sometimes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For a prompt requesting cuddling after a nightmare.
> 
> tws and cws in the end notes.

On the coast somewhere. A sentinel-stance, his hair knotty, wind-rushed. There's a craggy moss-stubbled headland jutting out like a broken jaw. The edges of his trainers toe the starting line of a curb. Before him, the grey waves of a cold-snap sea, broken by an irregular fortification against immersion, a patch of sand the colour of ashen skin that will soon be submerged.

A figure on the shoreline. Eyes out to the horizon, hair untethered, coat-less and shoe-less and immovable, reckless and wreckless against the sea that promises such storms.

Martin's the only one who can see the strengthening waves in the distance. Disturbed and agitated by some disaster, gathering to a tsunami.

There are stone steps, aged, foot-scored and weight-worn, and they're adorned with black railings kissed by rust. The steps curl around their path like hair around fingers to the beach front below.

Martin takes a step, and feels the glass of his legs crack. A hollow sound, reverberating with warning, the echo spiderwebbing through him. It doesn't _hurt_, not exactly, not really, and he takes another step, another, his eyes on the tide, the figure on the shore. The faster he goes, the more it splinters through him, feeling himself fragment, fracture, smithereens of glass crunching disconnected in his shoes, his socks, his trouser legs. Still he hobbles down the unforgiving stone, feeling limbs shatter with every shock of pressure, of misuse in a dull diamond cascade of the pieces of him that gather in his clothes where a man once was, and still he runs.

He's crumbling, an eroded cliff edge, a sand-swiped edifice to lost things and missed chances.

The figure on the beach doesn't move back, though surely they must hear how the wind is rising, surely they can't have failed to notice the tooth-filled snarling ferocity of the waves. Martin's throat is a sheen of slippery glass where words have no purchase, can't escape the lock of his throat.

The wind's wiping tears into his eyes that freeze into painful ragged shards almost immediately, and Martin feels the friction of his broken pieces as he tries to keep his shattered body moving, to go a bit faster, to get a bit closer.

The figure doesn't look back as they tread in the low tide and the wave ascends to greet them.

_Curling round immediately, mummified in sweaty bed blankets, something lost and feral scrabbling in his throat that soon manifests into sound._

_Sleepy, rousing to wakefulness._

_'Martin? Oh. Oh, right.'_

_Arms pulling close. Neck at an uncomfortable twist, ear over collarbone, but he buries himself in the thick embrace of it._

_'It was – ' he feels obliged to say. 'It was nothing, just a stupid – I'll, I'm fine, I'll...'_

_A default slide into poorly build but easily manned habits. A 'hush', fingers wiping sleep from his damp eyes._

_'Do you – do you want to talk about it?'_

_An offer given more easily than he takes it, but he is reclaiming the ground of himself steadily._  
  
_'I think you were there.' Whispered to the dark, to the hazy heat of under-covers. 'You wouldn't turn around, and I was so – I thought …'_

_Fingers setting in the handholds of hips, another 'it's alright, it's alright' as he relates his horrors to the patient dark._

He follows Peter's bloody map to the forbidding centre of the Panopticon. The mouths of empty cells, their bars like bared teeth, all facing dead centre, the stage of this horrible show.

The throne has a newly crowned king.

They've taken Jon's eyes. The blood tracking like warpaint scratched down his cheeks, and what they plucked out, they replaced improperly, with eyes that are not eyes, wide gaping chasm things like the backs of moth's wings.

The magnetic tape of all those statements, those carefully archived reels, they've been unspooled and it gathers like it's clogged in Jon's mouth, down his throat. The black lines of it spilling out like the straw of some macabre scarecrow, and Martin's hands are shaking and he prays, ill-worded little invocations to an almighty scraped together from school assemblies, that Jon wasn't taken like that, choking on fear, overwhelmed and airless, fingers scrabbling at a winched-in throat as he tried to breathe around the morass of other people's terrors.

Martin's prayers are that Jon felt nothing at all.

His ribcage has been splayed open, pivoted neatly with hinges like the top of a musical box. Weirdly bloodless for all it is a gory butchery of a human body, sand-white ribs that Martin finds himself counting. The heart is still there, shrivelling, wrinkled by strain and abuse. The rest of his chest, where other lungs and organs and the mechanisms of life should be harboured, is compacted as though with stuffing, the brutal gavage of some farm-reared delicacy. The eyes that expand and swell in this space roll in their vitreous parcels like twitching frogspawn. And then they all swivel with the fluid grace of owl necks, look at Martin, a thousand bobbing pupils staring out of the meat of Jon's chest, and that's the moment Martin realises Jon isn't dead.

_'M-martin! Martin!'_

_A harsh insistence poorly cloaking distress, hands against his shoulders, moving in aborted rocking shakes._

_'I – er, what, fuck – was I...?' Returning does not sweep away the agitation, the shaking like an earth tremor through him, the branding recollection of those fathomless eyes._

_'You were shouting.' Hair being wiped from his forehead, two eyes, two normal, worried, crow-footed eyes staring down at him._

_'W-what time is it?' he asks, but it's not an answer he wants or needs, he's just making sounds, fronting calm he doesn't feel. Runs clammy fingers over the bony column of a throat, the round of an adam's apple, a shirtless chest unmutilated and breathing shallowly._

_He feels the question form there, at the centre, the tentative journey it traverses before he hears 'Can I.... I mean, do you want to...?'_

_The question isn't fully born before he's heaving great waves of sobs into the chest he's pillowed on._

_Like clockwork, the arms come round, always an inch too tight a grip, and somehow that makes this easier to bear._

There are no monsters. In the dream that is not a dream, more a memory played out to its worst extremities, Martin walks, meandering and careless, along a beach. The sand is greyer, colour-sapped, and the waves are choppy, over-touched with foaming white like a poorly rendered oil landscape painting. There are ships out to the distance, but they're too far away, dirt flecks on the windscreen of horizon.

After a while, he sits down on the sand. Soaking the seat of his trousers, the backs of his legs. He watches the immutable horizon, blank like a lost opportunity, like a canvas where something meaningful could have been painted, anything at all really other than nothing. There are no clouds, no birds, and around him the day happens, unfolding in undemanding hours and minutes that leave no footprints, ruffle no waves.

He didn't bring any gloves and his hands cramp, the skin of his cheeks pinched with the tweaking chill. There are the marks of hoar-frost, sparkling and spiking, beginning to carpet the hairs on his arm, the skin of his exposed ankles.

The temperature drops, though the sky doesn't change. His fingers are gripped into numb claws now, and he wonders without much of a sense at all if he'll lose them to the cold. The frost is curdling in his lungs and it's hard to breathe. It has become a sensation like all the rest of them, like hunger and fright and panic, it is something happening to him so far away, to the him before, the one burdening himself with feeling like a pack-mule and wondering why he never moved forward.

The light refracts snow-blind off the white of the waves, and soon it is easier to close his eyes. He is not tired, but maybe he could lie down for a moment. It would be so simple to –

_Arms wrapped around chest from behind, a twinge as his ribs protest, his mouth forming a confused, displeased sound._

_'Jon. W- are you ok? You having a nightmare?'_

_A voice night-rough and dry rumbled against the dip between his shoulder blades: 'You were going away again'._

_'Oh'._

_The taste of chill is still enchanted and twisted up in the marrow of him, but it thaws in the near-ache of such a grip. Threading fingers together, palm union with palm, the soft rucks of scar tissue sliding against dry skin. He is held and beheld so tightly he lies there for a moment, his skin prickling with newly rediscovered heat._

_'Do you want to talk about it?'_

_An offer. Given and given and given, no thought to retraction. It is hard to be Lonely when that holds such a lantern to the dark of the forest beyond._

_'I'm, I'm ok, Jon,' he says, meaning it. Pulling arms slot around his stomach tighter. 'Thank you'._

_A grunting 'don't mention it', already sweetened by a doziness. The weight against his back closer, the arms flung around him like a mooring line._

_He drops back off sweltering in the muggy heat and sleeps dreamless till morning._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tws for body horror, mutilation. cws for dread, nightmares and intense emotional states, if those aren't anyone's jam


	15. playing games

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fluff, jonmartin, during episode 160′s scottish-happy-funtime. More character study than any real plot. Previously posted to tumblr, now tidied up

There’s no phone out here. No wifi, no bars of signal enough to even tease the possibility of the internet. Even if the TV worked, the antenna on the roof has been knocked askew by branches disturbed by some storm funnelled by the mountainous gully the house is camped in. The radio works intermittently and indecisively according to its own whims.

It’s a due and gratefully embraced respite for them at first. They spend long hours hibernating, bundled around the other in bed, or dropping to sleep against each other on the settee like wind-angled trees. Martin uses up all the hot water in the shower, feeling sensation eke back into his stiff, arthritic limbs, and Jon turns out to be a surprisingly competent cook with what little supplies they brought with them.

It’s a lulling, lotus-eaters snow-globe of an existence and they both know it can’t last.

The cottage isn’t huge, basic and utilitarian, and it doesn’t take them long to search out all its secrets. Martin finds three hunting knives and a bullet-proof vest tucked into a secret compartment in the wardrobe, and Jon searches out a bundle of flares, a length of harsh jute rope, and a handgun. They agree without conversation to leave all these things exactly where they are.

There’s no books or CDs or even cassette tapes, anything really that passes for entertainment for them to eat up the hours with. So the first time Martin heads down to the village, ambling along the mud-caked pathways and taking photos for Jon as he goes, he picks up some playing cards from the post office that doubles as the village shop. Stopping in an aisle that holds both birthday cards and tinned vegetables, he hums and furrows his brow, keying the change in his palm, counting under his breath. After a moment, he adds a bottle of wine to his meagre gatherings.

Jon last had a drink with Daisy in some quiet corner of a central London pub, before she was lost to the blood, and his mood sours morose to remember it; _she insisted on paying for the round,_ he says, the recollection expressed like a sigh. _We shared a pack of crisps, and we had a few quid for the jukebox, a-and it was – it was a nice night. Away from… away from it all._

His expression is flayed and too open. He keeps Martin's gaze despite his natural inclination to shutter off, turn away.

Martin goes quiet and starts picking at the paper label on the bottle with his gnawed-down nails and says the last time he drank was when Peter Lukas gave him a sea-salted hip flask to drink from; _ 'a toast, he called it’ _ he recalls bitterly, and he does turn his gaze away, a hardness striking across his face like shame, even as his hand reaches for Jon's. _ ‘To our new “alliance” or whatever. It was rum, I think, god it was just, gross, you know. Burned like oil on the way down. Peter clapped me on the shoulder, said he was proud of me, and I felt – I felt sick.’_

Jon pours their wine into mismatched mugs and leans against his shoulder, and they drink it far too fast. Martin regrets not getting another bottle. But it does its job, and a tension in them unwinds, their conversations taking a turn-off to a road less rocky as their thoughts get a little woolly, their motions and movements slightly looser.

Martin can’t really remember how to play the card games he thought he knew – he last played _Go Fish_ on a wet caravan holiday when he was much younger, and his remembrances of _Stop the Bus_ and _Twenty-One_ are tainted by the fact he played them as drinking games – so he fluffs the rules with an unearned confidence that Jon sees right through. Not that it matters much – Jon keeps forgetting what he's meant to do anyway and just throws down what he hopes is the right combination of cards with an expectant look at Martin.

Jon is apparently not a very competitive player. He likes the buzz of the game, and interrupts with effusive tipsy interjections when he thinks he’s winning, but each victory is taken much the same as each loss.

(He mostly appears to be playing because Martin asked and he wants to see him happy, rather indulging in his top three favourite activities. These, from careful observation over the last four days, can be classified as; sleeping and wrapping himself bodily around Martin like the world’s boniest big spoon, dozing while listening to the radio, a warm mug still precariously cupped in his hands, and in a close third, trying to get Martin to be actively involved in both previous mentioned hobbies.)

Martin likes playing, not necessarily competitively, but where he does excel is in cheating. Jon catches him swapping out a three for a queen out of the corner of his eye – well, Martin wants him to catch him, wants to wring something happy from the tired turn of his mouth – and his resulting smile is wide and shocked and gleeful in his own way – _Martin... Did you just – Martin! _

Martin keeps cheating, ever more ostentatiously, and it evolves into a game of showmanship, how far he can get without Jon catching him, Jon who now commits him his entire attention, caught up in this very different, far more enjoyable competition. It's slightly creepy in an affectionate way, because he keeps forgetting to blink. Martin revels in the intensity of it, that single-minded focus committed to something other than horror and tragedy, to see Jon’s triumphant and fond _'aha!’_ when he figures it out.

The next time Martin goes down to the shop, he gets talking to some of the locals, and in no time they’ve all banded together like some rural racketeering set-up to donate him some old jigsaws, a backgammon board, and a scrabble set. Martin, laden with these rattling, boxed-up treasures and another couple of wine bottles, returns home like some valiant wanderer bearing victorious spoils.  
Jon’s face splits into the rarest of smiles when he sees them.

(And it turns out, as Jon shamelessly and boldly sets down 'aba’ and 'mho’ and 'qi’ with a glint in his eye, Martin wiping tears from his eyes –_ those aren’t, god, ha, Jon y-you can’t, they aren’t words, Jon, you’re such a cheat! / I can and they are and so I will. So that's eleven points to me_ – that he’s _incredibly_ competitive at scrabble.)


	16. gift-giving

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jon gives Martin a present.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> absolutely shameless fluff, set in a nebulous post-160 world.

The night was long, sharpened by noises from far off. The day feels like an unearned arrival come too early, and so, stretching out and feeling the labouring of the coming day leaden in his limbs, Martin makes the active, unusual decision to stay where he is. No packing up, no travelling, no moving further south. Consciousness resurfaces like a wave-tossed buoy intermittently, coddled as he is in the burrito roll he's made of the sleeping bag. Snatches of dream-sleep are mild for a change, fog-less, almost shockingly mundane. 

A hand shakes him, and Martin starts from the senseless weight of his dozing into alertness. 

Jon's face looms over, greying hair straggling down like pond-weed and up this close, Martin can see silvered lines scraped down his throat, like those Japanese pottery pieces, broken and remade and better in the reforming. His expression isn't set in tension however, no indication of alarm or danger, so Martin feels his eyes flutter again, curling half away with a noise crushed against his elbow. Jon presses lips to Martin's forehead, brushing away flyaway coils of hair, clearly intending this to be a rousing call, but Martin's having none of it; he tries to tug at Jon, pull him down and lure him back into the warm enclave of their sleeping bag. 

Jon, steadfast and stubborn in his commitment to ruin Martin's comfort, shakes him again. Martin grumbles sound masquerading as complaint and belligerently tucks his body back into the thick heat he shifted out of. 

Fingers come burrowing, digging relentless into the softer vulnerable skin of his sides, under his arms, and Martin worms away and tries to choke down the unbidden giggle forced from him - “Jon!” he whines, snorting as the fingers continue to dance. “Christ – I'm awake, I'm awake!”

When he looks at him, Jon is smiling. Trying to tamp down the intensity of his emotion into something more in tone with the earliness of the hour, failing. 

His over-bright eyes stretch their pupils to the edge of his corneas, dilated as an owl. Martin often teases that Jon looks like he's high, when his eyes are blown wide like that. Jon will gesture back a swearword. 

“Hmmpfh,” Martin complains, nosing his face into the thin pillow, attempting to pull up the corner of the sleeping bag, only to find Jon squishing it immovable beneath the weight of his bony knees. He's heavy enough, for such a thin scaffolding of a man. “Christ – Jon, I was _sleeping..._”

Jon makes a flapping motion with his hand like an opening-closing mouth, mouthing a mocking mimicry of Martin's words with cheeky relish. Martin gets enough of a leg out to try and half-heartedly kick him in the side, and Jon darts away, laughing at the petulant expression Martin pulls in response. 

That smile continues to bloom wild on Jon's face. Martin is often gifted with Jon's smiles; tired ones wrenched from exhaustion-clenched lips, closed-mouth side-eye 'eyes on the map not me Martin' smiles, closed-mouth half-lidded fond smiles when dawn sees Jon awake before Martin – Jon's pupils small and tight, such a moment not food for the Watcher. 

Not usually this one though. Giddy, pleased with himself, tongue behind teeth.

“Woss, what's wrong?” Martin starts, but Jon's pressing something into his hands firmly, so self-satisfied, joyous and smug with a mysterious success that Martin feels his own grin start to blossom in kind, wanting to take part in the same delight. “What is it?”

Jon pushes his cargo over again, tapping the cover of it with a dense insistent rhythm. 

“_An appropriate gift,_” he replies flippantly, his voice crackling off its old cadence like a radio turned wrong. Martin hasn't heard Jon's voice since the world ended. This stolen intonation taking on a rolling confidence, turning a tale with ease, relaying a story like an aged raconteur. Martin winces. 

“Had to be the voice of that old windbag,” he sighs, and Jon shrugs and continues to stare at Martin. Awaiting his reaction, leaning back on his hunches. 

It's a book. Something that would have, before, been a charity-shop find, a plain hardback without dust cover, smeared with mud and water-damage, the pages curling. 

Martin reads the title. 

“It's... how did you find this?”

Jon rolls his eyes: “_The crude methods of your archivist_,” he pours out with a defiant female touch, and waves his hand like it's not important, rocking on the legs he's tucked under his knees. His odd eyes bright, unblinking, the light falling into them rather than reflecting back. 

He makes a fast series of enquiries with his fingers. Martin's eyes have gone dewy as he runs his finger reverently down the broken-backed spine of it. He always does this. They can't carry much, essentials between stops, but Jon filches treasures from the wastelands beyond like a canny magpie. An ornate pocket-watch, still sort of working when the winds run right, a tarnished St Christopher, a set of knitting needles that they've unfortunately lost since, having to co-opt them as impromptu weaponry instead. 

All things small enough to be unobtrusive, compact enough to justify keeping, and always for Martin.

“Of course I do,” he replies. “I love it.”

Jon huffs, like it was nothing, but his face is content as he sees Martin's positive response.

“Thought you hated Keats,” Martin continues, voice a little damp, starting to sit up. 

Jon shrugs, as though it doesn't matter, and settles down next to Martin, his earlier animation translating to a sudden tiredness. They haven't really stopped for weeks now. Martin's been worrying that Jon's overdoing it.

He wraps an arm around bony shoulders, anchoring, and Jon hums, moves himself back in closer. Martin hugs Jon from the back, in a manner similar to the way they sleep, Jon's back cushioned by Martin's front. Martin always grips too tightly in the night, clinging like he's trying to fashion a single person with the clay of their bodies. 

It's Martin's intention to read over Jon's shoulder while the other man dozes, and he starts to open the pages to see what can be salvaged, but Jon clearly has other ideas. He flicks through, a great number of pages marred with dirt, spotted with fire damage, but still mostly legible, until he finds what he's apparently looking for. He points decisively. 

“Demanding of you,” Martin says, clearly teasing. “Considering it's my gift.”

Jon just nestles back against Martin. 

“Why this one?”

Jon deliberates. This isn't unusual. Their rudimentary sign language is fledgling, born from necessity and intent, but it's foundational at best, designed to question and warn and indicate and they've not yet worked out nuances. Jon is clearly mentally parsing through the library he contains of other people's utterances, finding them all imperfect. 

He leans up, the angle awkward, kisses Martin softly, knocking their noses together. 

It's not an answer, not really, but Martin goes red as bushfire through his beard, and tries, fails, not to look soppy at the gesture. Jon looks like he's got his point across, presses a final kiss, like a gentler, more intimate encore to the first, then indicates the poem again, raising an expectant eyebrow. 

Despite his best intentions, five minutes and a number of stanzas later, he's started to snooze heavy in Martin's arms. Martin himself drops off after eight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jon's 'speech' is taken from Simon Fairchild (MAG151) and Manuela Dominguez (MAG143).


	17. gift-giving, redux

In the early days, when this was a more bird-boned, tentative, arms-length dance of a thing, Jon used to wonder if Peter Lukas was right about not knowing. If that mattered. And then, course, the world ended and then didn't; there was Scotland and another hundred shivering, vulnerable, open-ribbed moments in between, and now Jon savours the unfolding of these small knowledges, the evolution of his carefully and precisely filed collection of things he now has the time and privilege to learn, without Knowing.

The newest of his favoured category of Martin facts, a topic of specialism that holds pride of place in his soul; that Martin – when not making manipulative gambit allegiances with morally chaotic fear avatars, or being menaced by a roster of pan-dimensional horrors – is in his own way, kind of particular.

Jon should have known, really. What with the retro sensibilities and the lo-fi charm.

Jon wakes up one morning, cushioned leisurely in a pudgy over-big duvet, blinking and grunting into awakeness, to find a cup of tea being held out to him, cartoonishly wafted under his nose. Martin is getting back into bed from the cold-soaked rooms of their modest flat, touching his chilled feet against Jon's leg. The mug is a kiln-fired handmade effort, glazed with a dappling two-tone of blue and green, and Martin had explained the process to him while he'd ummed and ahhed over buying a set at a two-day crafts market they'd had to drive fifty minutes to get to.

(Martin had bought the set in the end, when Jon had encouraged him to. In its new home in the cupboard, it clashes horribly with Jon's uninspired basic set of one-colour cups and plates and bowls he got from Ikea back in the late 2000's, but Jon likes seeing them there, nestled in next to his own things.)

When the tea cools down enough for him to sip, Jon makes an interested noise.

“What's this?” he asks Martin, who is sitting next to him in bed, pillows squashed and propping him up behind his back. “It's new.”

Martin's put on his reading glasses, and he's flicking idly through the local events pages. (Martin, it has turned out, likes to _do _things at the weekend. Jon has the sinking feeling that Martin has been suggesting ideas to him and he's just been humming his agreement, not really awake or listening in his morning-fuzzy, bleary way.)

“It's a loose-tea blend. Kind of a smoky flavour. You like it?”

“Hmm,” Jon replies, deliberately non-partisan, not sold on the taste. He gives it another sip gingerly, trying to be open-minded, railing against his natural inclinations to do the opposite. “Have we run out of tea bags?”

Jon, contrary to popular belief – _I'm not __that__ incapable, Martin! - _does make his own tea. He's been buying the same brand for years, the Yorkshire Tea stuff his grandma always used to get, leaving the bag in until it was black and weighty with the taste – _Christ, boss, you could stand a spoon up in that, _Tim had used to say – before adding milk and sugar.

At the mention of teabags, Martin _tries _not to look sniffy. He really does. But Jon catches one pained flash of distaste, tussling with and finally stamped down by Martin's natural desire to see the best in people. It's the same expression he made when he looked in Jon's cupboards and found the off-brand Red Bull knockoff. The multiple flavours of Pot Noodle and Tesco's own brand tinned soups and baked beans. The precarious huddled packs of opened, semi-used pastas and rice, and the miserable barely-touched bag that is the only evidence of Jon's experimental, ill-advised attempt to cook quinoa.

Jon feels a wide smile begin on his face (still so rare, still hard-won, but Martin teases them out of him with the smallest things these days).

“You _hipster_!” he says with delight, secretly pleased he's found something he can tease Martin about. “Have you thrown out my teabags just to make a point?”

“I'm not!” Martin exclaims, rather confidently for a man who owns braces. “They're at the back of the cupboard. I just think you deserve better than the wood shavings they put in those things.”

Jon's happiness doesn't abate, now he's found this in, and the teasing goes on for some time – _is this stage one then? Am I going to come home one day and you've chucked out all my pot noodles? / Those things have the nutritional content of dog food Jon, I wouldn't choose this as your hill to die on – _until Martin stops his mouth with first, a kiss, and then a proposed visit to a local history museum, which they spiritedly argue about at length, enjoying the give and take of the heatless discussion.

Martin had thought that was the end of it.

Until Jon comes home one day, and he's bought Martin a new tea-pot, one of those fancy glass ones with an infuser inside. He doesn't say anything, just leaves it on the side by Martin's growing hoard of tea cannisters for him to find.

“Thought you'd like it,” is all he says when Martin asks.

It doesn't stop there. A notebook from one of those alley-way odds-and-sods shops, still bearing a little fairtrade sticker, a striking design of interlocking triangles – _If you need one, you know, you've been saying you wanted to get back into your poetry. _They take a stroll down Camden Market one weekday and Martin loses Jon for a second when he gets distracted by some tasteful glass animals, and it turns out he's snuck into one of those faux retro, tragically hip clothes shops, and has purchased a quirky pair of socks bearing breakfast foods with smily faces. Martin makes one comment once about how he quite likes novelty cufflinks, and now he owns three of them, each simply appearing in his bedside drawer.

Jon always just raises his shoulders. “Thought you'd like them,” he'll say.

Martin stammers when he tries to say it to Jon, but as much as he isn't very good at showing how much he likes it, how much it means to him, he thinks it's ever so sweet. Thoughtful and sincere, and every time Martin sees something appearing, without fanfare or fuss, knowing that Jon's seen it in a shop window and bought it just because he thinks Martin will like it, well of course it does something funny to his insides. If he's being honest, and he's getting better at that these days, he feels a little melty and has to go find wherever Jon is sitting, squinting over some dry document (he needs reading glasses, he's just being really stubborn about it), kissing him until he's pink and looking pleased.

Jon will still sneak out the Yorkshire teabags from the back of the cupboard when he thinks Martin's not around. Martin pretends he doesn't notice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Personal headcanons that didn't make it into this fic:   
\-- though he's perfectly capable of not doing so, Jon can and does eat like a first year undergrad student. Martin despairs.   
\-- someone at work bought Martin a Whittards giftcard, and since then Jon's life has never known peace (or normal tea). He'll happily badger Martin to buy some of those fancy hot chocolates though, 'just while you're there'.  
\-- Martin looks very dapper and tragically hipster in his reading glasses. They make him look years younger, and Jon harrumphs when he's mistaken for the older of the two of them.   
\-- Martin likes farmer's markets and car boot sales and craft fairs. Jon loves him and so goes with him. In the spirit of an equal and fair exchange in a relationship, Martin doesn't complain when Jon wants to go to another train museum or another exhibition on at the portrait gallery. Martin personally prefers landscapes himself.


	18. considerations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jon likes looking at Martin, in the mornings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for a prompt asking for my headcanons about Jon and Martin. 
> 
> Martin first - who, every since I saw the Argos Christmas Advert, I've headcanoned as looking like a slightly younger, more bespectacled Omar Abidi.

Jon isn't a morning person. It's what Martin always says. Jon's body will rebel defensive against any disruption to his hibernation, and he will unattractively snort at any indication that he's expected to leave the warm burrow he's made in the bed before a time he deems mentally acceptable. Martin, ever feeling the need to be sensible, will nudge him with a gentle hand, say 'I'll make a cuppa, come on'.

This routine plays out as predictably as sunrise in the ten or so minutes after Martin's alarm chirps on. Martin leaves the bed first, pushing his feet into slippers that match the pattern on his pyjama shorts, and Jon listens to the creaking fanfare of his descent into the kitchen, the demanding mewl of the cat joining the tune on cue. Inevitably, grunting, but placated with the promise of something hot, Jon toes on his own more battered slippers and make his way downstairs to join them.

Jon isn't a morning person. But, well, he is. Or he can be. He's perfectly capable of getting up and out of the house in fifteen minutes; he had the rat-race-routine down pat when he was working at the Archives. Up with a sigh, brisk shower paired with a hissing curse if the boiler was deciding to play dirty, dressing perfunctory and without any sartorial flair, breakfast bar pocketed for eating on the Tube as he shrugged on his coat.

But he much prefers this slow and lazy unwinding of a day because he gets to study Martin. He puts his elbows on the wooden table off to the side of their pokey kitchen, his body loose, slouched, poor-postured, and enjoys watching an artless, intimate one-man performance just for him, as he acclimatises to the day.

Martin's thrown on one of Jon's cardigans against the morning chill – though, honestly, it's more Martin's now. Martin's thicker arms have over-stretched the fabric of it through the wearing, so they'd curtain Jon's more knobbly limbs if he tried to reclaim what was his. His dark hair is unruly, and what with the hand he runs through it as he yawns, the situation isn't improved. He keeps saying it needs a cut, but like his weekly claims that he'll get more bin bags, or that he won't buy any more books, Jon has his doubts. Besides, Jon likes the curling quiff it makes at the front when his usually neat style has been ruffled by sleep.

Martin yawns wide again, and rubs at the close-cut beard that frames his face. He's not picked up his glasses from where he leaves them at night, the arms of them splayed wide over some lurid pulp novel: Jon will be sniffy, teasingly ask him how he can read that stuff, and Martin will turn over the pages without retorting with even a glance, replying in a prim voice, 'You, Jonathan, are such a snob', and it makes Jon beam like a delighted lightbulb, every time, without fail.

(Martin is kept in such literary masterpieces by Jon anyway, who chucks him whatever is featuring on Tesco's Bestseller shelves this week with a heavy, pretend-sigh.)

Martin is squinting slightly at the mugs he's picked out of the cupboard – Jon washed up last night while Martin chose a film to watch, but clearly he didn't complete the task in a manner befitting Martin's high standards as he puts them back near the sink to wash again later and picks out two better, cleaner ones. Jon watches him, too-small cardie straining over a pop-culture t-shirt that doubles as nightwear over the round of his stomach, tartan-patterned cotton shorts that show off the muscled back of his legs. Jon, who has never seen a form of exercise he's trusted, is not-so secretly enamoured with the view.

(According to Martin, the working out used to be a stress release thing, and involved running very fast on a machine until he couldn't breathe and couldn't think any more. Since everything has quietened down, he's moved on to more considered and healthily minded strengthening and lifting activities, the science of which Jon's brain doesn't even try and appreciate, but the results of which, that Martin can now easily and bodily lift Jon, he absolutely does.)

“Like what you're seeing?” Martin hums sleepily, having sat down at the table himself, and Jon's not ashamed to have been caught staring.

“Always,” he says, accepting the mug, putting it down to cool, shamelessly returning to consider his favourite parts up close; the soft round of Martin's nose, the crinkling lines at the un-tensed corners of his mouth, the crow's feet beginning to root at the edging of his eyes, the deep, warm brown of that gaze now looking fondly at him.

Martin puts a hand over Jon's eyes, covering them playfully. Jon calls him a spoilsport, and he doesn't need to see Martin to know he's smiling at him.


	19. lapsing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is the trouble, even now, with being an Archive. 
> 
> or: Martin’s not the only one overly susceptible to the Lonely.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mild content warnings for themes and imagery associated with Forsaken, and for disassociation.

Jon loses himself in the odds-and-sods shop.

The sign on the door makes promises of it being a cosy bookshop. And there are books, certainly, stalagmites of tomes and paperbacks and collections teetering graspingly up towards the ceiling.

The books are absent flatmates however compared to the boisterous gaggle of _stuff _that takes up room everywhere else. Teacup candles balanced on Norton Anthologies. A wooden rocking horse keeping the dusty Faber and Faber poetry company. It's bizarre flotsam of the most incomprehensible comforting sort, and it sometimes bustles its way to star in the shop's equally manic window display.

Which is why Jon first came in. He'd told himself that this trip into town was an in-and-out only affair; pick up the spices he couldn't get at the small-stocked village shop, buy more firelighters and return some of Martin's horde to the library from whence it came. He's entertaining some thoughts of making a start on pruning back some of the more frivolous bushes in the garden if the weather holds, though he knows his knees won't credit the idea by the evening if he does so.

But then he saw the pen in the window. Silver filigree engraved at the end like frost spiralling up a window, the base colour deep and blue. And it's not anywhere near Christmas, and there's no birthdays for another few months, but Jon looks at it and he can see Martin sat in the two-seater in their living room, holding the pen, tongue between his teeth as he worries at words, scratching and rewriting and humming when he's caught upon a phrase he feels sits well.

He goes inside with all the furtiveness of a guilty cat. Maryam is at the counter today, and she beams to see him. And he intends – completely – to pick out the pen and be done with it. But Maryam gets talking even once he's pointed out and paid for the pen, and he's twisted up in the soft and easy twirl of her conversation. The pen does come with a box, a regular black affair, but she mentions that they've got in a few antique pen cases down at the back of the non-fiction isle – covering P for Persian Empire to T for Travelogues – and Jon fancifully commits to having a leisurely look because he's going to have to wait for the next bus back anyway, quite taken by the idea of being able to leave such a distinguished looking surprise on the side-table near Martin's armchair for him to find when he comes in from work.

He considers the cases with a furrowing frown, as though weighing up some great decision. For so long in fact, he doesn't notice the shop dip quiet, the muffled steps and page-flicking of other patrons muted to silent.

He glances up, around. Puts back the supple brown leather case he was thinking over, stepping out of his isolated row.

There is no one at the front desk. No one in the other shelves. Through the clogged-up and slapdash window display, he sees no one on the street outside and a sky starting to grey with the threat of rain.

He notices – far away, like glancing through the wrong end of a telescope – that his breathing is getting faster.

“Maryam?” he says, but his voice croaks heatless. He tells himself that he's too old for this now, to be taken in by such worn-down ghosts, that she's gone in the back, that it's just gone quiet, that's all. But the silence is a terror that begets greater, stronger strains, a cycling distress of pin-balling fears and memories, and there is no one around, no one coming, and the panting of his own body is so loud in such an empty space.

And he has always been more easily enveloped by some fears than by others.

He hears the wash of mile-distant waves, as though behind the shelves to the front of the shop, and thinks _not here, not here. _

He tries to shake his head loose of the fog beginning to bind it like cobwebbing wisps. But the world has such terrors in it, and the Archive keeps record of them all. And that's what Jon is, in the end. A dutiful collection of horror, cruelly moulded into such service by a long dead man. He's long since unshouldered the mantle of Archivist, yet Archive has proven to be such a long-lived, enduring post.

Behind his eyes, he plays out the washed-out retellings of all those almost lost to the Lonely.

He's the statement of Zoe Aristidou, who moved to a beam-bright city but brought her fog along with her, who lost her face amongst the impartial crowds, sanded away like a wind-abused statue.

The statement of Keira Hurley, who struggled to make friends, who drank thinking it might stuff up the gaping absence inside her where the fog was beginning to spark up like struck flint, who would lose her keys, and her wallet and whole days to unremembrance.

There is the echo of beachland nearby and Jon's lost sight of the shelves. The layering cares and carefully tended wards that make him up are starting to peel away.

He rubs at his hands and the colour wipes off like highlighter on whiteboard, smearing before vanishing, his skin blotching with an absent glass-colour of nothing at all. And it's not real, it can't be, it's _years _since he sighted this muted, mist-encrusted shoreline, the way it gnawed at and sapped Martin's skin translucent, younger then, his hair still unpicked by white.

But it's so easy to return here even after all that time. Like tripping over your own feet.

It is peaceful here. It always is.

Jon grips the pen, feeling the drunken choke of the statement of Keira Hurley, how it makes his legs unmoored and unbalanced, and he thinks _no, no, I'm going to give this to him, I'll surprise him, I'll leave it on his side table to find when he gets home. _And the statement is thick on his tongue, as he recalls how she woke up, head woozy, and she had not known where she was, had forgotten her address, her name, and the muted panic of her fear sleeked her face with tears, and Jon shakes his head fervently to try and clear it.

He thinks of how Martin will glow, pleased, will say something like _you shouldn't have, _or even, _you know I don't need any more, _and Jon will say, _I know but I wanted to, I know but I thought of you, I know but I wanted to make you happy._

There is sand crunching underfoot as he walks, and he's getting lost.

He is the statement of Agneta Blom regarding her grandmother Ebba Blom, swallowed by the fog in her later years at a nursing home; the statement of Lakshman Hamal, the last member of his regiment far from home; the statement of Finlay Erskine, a lone lighthouse keeper midst a terrible storm.

And Jon is one man but he is also all these stories – he breathes in salt-damp from a wave spray that leaves freckles of water struck across his face, he feels the knotted ache in his legs from where he's crouched, tense and gripping his kukri for hours, the over-softness of blankets and pillows and the faded mist of lavender down an empty hallway.

He feels his fingers cramping around the sides of the pen, and he wants to think of Martin, to fill up with recollections of him, but Martin is someone Jon knows, someone Jon loves, and it is so very hard to remember he is Jon at the moment.

The fog that subsumes him like a dust cloud, it's muffling. Quiet. He who is Agneta Blom and Lakshman Hamal and Finlay Erskine and so many other names that are layering palimpsest over Jonathan Blackwood, he wanders the beach to the shoreline, letting the sea lap over his shoes. The sky is expectant with dour rainclouds, and his jean cuffs are getting wet, and he hears a distant tumult of voices ever so far off. Like a muttered conversation in another room, a tune playing in a building he is walking past.

“..._call the school.... It's Mr Blackwood, Conor... one of his turns.... don't crowd the poor man, let him be...”_

The Archive drinks in the flat, null landscape with interest and lets the fog bury into the soft spaces of him. It wants to walk out into the shallow waters and see what swims there.

There's a pen in his hand, and it's heavy, and it weighs him down shore-bound.

“_Jon? Hey, hey, Jon. Don't go out so far, yeah?_”

The Archive sucks in a breath. It is not salted with a harsh coastal grind, it does not bite at his throat. The air is warm, dry with indoor heating, and the people he is not, Agneta and Lakshman and Finlay and Mairead and Pavo and so many more witness to Forsaken, begin to slough off him like autumnal leaves.

There is a hand on his arm, someone being shushed, a breathing like someone's been running.

“_That's it, you're doing so well, you can do it.”_

He is Jonathan again. He blinks loose the crisping grains of salt that have begun to sediment in his lashes. There are tears streaming down his face, he realises belatedly, and he is trembling like he's freezing.

He looks at Martin who makes up such a happy horizon to be greeted by, looking down. His tie become loose, who has come from work, sweat-patches at the front of his chest, his throat and face reddened with exertion, who is still wearing his navy lanyard, has board pens clunking in his pocket. Martin who is grounding him.

“I...” he says, clearing his throat feeling stupid, and then he is thrusting out the pen almost bullishly. “I got you a pen.”

Maybe Martin doesn't understand how important it is for him to see. But he nods delicately, and carefully nods, takes it from Jon's shaking fingers – _You shouldn't have, you know, _he says like Jon's foolish, but fondly, ever so, just like Jon thought he would, and Jon almost sobs to be granted such a small victory.

“You wanting me to call Doctor Varma, Mr B?” comes the tentative, worried voice of Conor at Martin's elbows – sixteen, his voice breaking awkwardly, helping out in the shop after school; Jon remembers lending him books when he was a precocious, demanding child, voracious for knowing.

“We should be ok,” Martin replies kindly. To Jon, he says:

“Julienne's car's out front.”

Jon frowns, confused, before remembering – theirs is in for its MOT, Martin must have borrowed it to cross the three miles between the villages. There is something heavy around his shoulders, warm and scratchy, and he wants to wonder but the questions are sunken in the softness still lingering in his head.

“Do you need...?” Jon starts, and the words are thick and phlegmy in his throat. “The school...?”

“Julienne's covering my last class,” Martin says soothingly. “They understand.”

Jon nods. Years ago, he might have apologised, stewed in how much he needed Martin today, but time has wasted away those anxieties.

“Thank you for coming for me,” he replies instead, his voice still sea-bitten and hoarse, and lets Martin lead him wobbly-legged out of the door so they can drive home.


	20. swapped

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Patron-switched. 
> 
> (Lonely!Jon and Beholding!Martin, no spoilers past early series 4)

Martin is a hoarder. A habit ingrown with the knot of years; life never gave him much so he dug his clutching, wanting fingers into the grooves of any handout, willing it stay. It didn't warp him cruel or unkind; if anything, it wore down his nerves over-sensitive, too willing to understand, to empathise, to forgive. It does bend the boughs of him inward, makes him dragon-hearted and jealous for human connection, for ways he can make himself useful and wanted. Even before the Eye found him, he would ferret away knowledge, secrete it in the crags of himself; _Marnie's birthday is Saturday the twenty-fifth, she likes magenta and video games and that one song by the Killers;Jim's just started physio on his shoulder, says he wants to get back into playing rugby; Mark isn't sleeping well, the baby's keeping him up, maybe I should get him more of that coffee next time I'm at the shops. _

It's such an easy shortcut to make you feel needed by others, to shroud yourself in the palls of their lives until you can barely see the ill-kempt weave of your own.

Martin asks questions that never work out like questions; they are indirect, little prompts following on from what flows out naturally, a side-effect of actively listening, taking the deeper, closer wooded paths of seemingly sun-lit conversations. Martin likes to think he's just very good with people, that he just 'gets them' in a way they didn't believe they could be known, and this is partly true. They open up to him like grateful sunflowers, and it brings him such a sense of being of value that it takes him a long time to realise there's a little more to it.

Elias looks at him expectantly, with a patient gaze, when he makes him Head Archivist, and Martin doesn't like the acquisitive magpie gleam of it.

Martin is good at noticing things. He is neither sceptic, nor has the manner in him to be overly proud (though he can be, deceptively so, though it shames him to acknowledge, proud of what he has hoarded so greedily, what he has parsed from others, their idiosyncrasies, dark hollows, covert terrors, little stolen knowledges.)

No, upon Martin has been bestowed the awful capacity for empathy, able to translate the whys and whats of a person with such a smiling open-faced ease.

It makes him more dangerous than Gertrude, in many ways.  
  


* * *

It is a surprise to no one that upon taking over the Institute, Peter Lukas turns his hand at trying to steer Jonathan Sims to the Lonely. Ill-suited to personability and gregariousness, Sims is sharp-worded, quick-tempered, irascible and standoffish (and how proud, how abundantly and how obviously, so so isolatingly proud). Hedgehog-backed, taking what life has taught him and turning it outwards as armour, unwilling to easily make friends, it was often a source of amusement that Jon, like a grumpy and unbiddable office wraith, was counted as a member of their small team.

(And he so fiercely counted them as kin in return; the teasing, awkwardly-returned jokes batted back to Tim when they were lobbed over, Tim who knew when his growls and grumbles were toothless, when his spines were up for defense rather than spite, Tim who defended him against those less patient, Tim who grew angry and spitting, who left Jon's corner and lost himself to the Circus. Sasha, who was lost entirely – she invited Jon to pub quizzes and nights out and film afternoons and sometimes he would even come, shoulders hunched with self-consciousness, something budding like a smile on his stony face; Sasha, whose birthday Jon carefully wrote down on his calendar at home, buying her a card and a tastefully chosen gift every year without fail, until suddenly her birthday wasn't what he'd remembered, and then she wasn't who he'd remembered.

Martin, who he shared lunches with, words as gentle as he was able to make them, dusk-scratched evenings with low light and slow trickling words and a sense of being seen, of someone wanting to see him, for the first time in a long time. With whom he butted heads and argued and challenged with all the tenacity that those outside might not be able to see as a hard-won, professional respect. A private, burgeoning something else that was obvious to those looking.)

It is only a surprise that, standing empty-handed, empty-hearted and sentinel over Martin's bedside, the last of their fractured band disbanded, Jon doesn't succumb to Forsaken faster.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can pry the headcanon that Martin (like Tim and Sasha to a lesser degree) was set up to become a replacement Archivist in case Jon didn't survive all the Powers from my cold cold fingers. 
> 
> (Feel free to send prompts on Tumblr!)


	21. intimate rituals

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For a prompt celebrating Trans Day of Visibility
> 
> post-160, domesticity despite it all.

The mirror in the safehouse is attached to the bathroom cabinet, and it makes a triptych of grim expressions at their maker, divided by the two side cabinets and a pushed-back middle shelf. The mirror is murky and marked from where condensation's been wiped away after one of Martin's scalding showers, flecked with toothpaste stains and some genuine wear-and-tear.

Jon's hair is getting long.

Grown out enough to tuck thoughtlessly behind his sticking-out ears, twisting in rucks like the waves of disturbed blankets, enough to scrape into a haphazard ponytail, to idly plait and tie up out of the way. Jon knows Martin is fond of his hair, magnetised to it in the rare moments it's down, humming appreciatively as he runs his fingers through the sheet of it, diligently unlooping the knots and tangles Jon manages to work into it.

It's fine. Jon likes the attention, likes the sensation of Martin's hands over his scalp.

He twists a lock, and the triplets of his reflection look pensive.

It's fine. It's convenience, he'll make do, it's not like he's really been in the position to get a haircut these past years. It's fine, because it's not worms, is it, it's not the creep of fog or a horrible knowing, and of everything, it seemed such a small thing to let go of, another minor agency leached away.

He doesn't like it, but then Jon doesn't like the rounded burrowing scars on his throat and shoulder blades, the wire-slit of raised and lighter scar tissue across his throat, the explosive shrapnel that scored a fine rip over his cheek, his forehead, bisecting his eyebrow in exactly the place he used to have a piercing when he was a younger man.

It's such a little thing. Jon can deal with those until they build up and bury him.

He runs his fingers distastefully through split ends, how _much _of it there all is.

It's such a little thing, and it's _fine, _but there are so many things he can't control these days. He can't get back the words keel-hauled out of his throat, he can't close the staring sky back up, he can't protect himself, can't protect Martin forever from things out there that will surely come for them.

He makes the decision in the way he makes so many; agonising deliberation followed by decisive and rash action.

Jon goes into the bedroom, rattles around in bedside cabinets and suitcases until he uncovers Martin's old jalopy of an electric razor, a comb that he cleans free of Martin's curling red hairs. Diverts into the kitchen with his spoils held in his arms, grabs a pair of scissors from the drawer nearest the sink.

It is slow and careful work. It is more fiddly than predicted. But he can feel the settling air on the nape of his neck, sense the chill through the close-cut buzz, the itch of the cut hairs, the drone and shudder of the razor against his palm, and he feels a little more like _Jon, _like himself with everything he strips away.

After a few moments, Martin comes to stand by the bathroom door, watches.

“It's all or nothing with the hair, then?” he asks, making a joke as he watches another clump of curls collect at Jon's bare feet. Jon has learned that this is how Martin gauges a scene, tests waters he isn't sure are shallow.

“I've never liked it long,” Jon says finally. He doesn't add any more detail, and Martin doesn't ask him to. Martin makes an understanding noise that's a placeholder for so much more.

Then: “You won't be able to get at the back. Want me to...?”

Jon considers, gives a cautious 'why not shrug' and hands over the razor. He has little hairs sticking all over his hands and wrists, and he washes the most stubborn of them off while Martin positions himself.

Thankfully, Martin respects the silent ritual of it. He goes through with the comb almost over-carefully, neatening the rough patches Jon has missed, running the clippers slowly over the back and sides again for good measure, his face furrowed in a dedicated concentration.

“More?” he asks, and Jon looks in the mirror, considers his thoughtful reflections. There's still too much at the top, a weight and heft and curl to it, and he nods, and Martin picks up the scissors again.

Jon tidies his beard while Martin gets the dustpan. He hasn't gone a day clean-shaven since he finally managed to grow it in, months of impatient waiting and checking for scrappy hairs in a bathroom mirror not unlike this one, but he prefers to keep it short and neat regardless.

Martin comes back in as he's working on the fiddly angles of his top lip, the sides of his mouth.

“Thoughts?” Jon says, splashing his face with water, washing off the excess hairs and dabbing his face dry.

“Better than the scraggly unshaved look you've been going for recently,” Martin says, clearly feeling cheeky, and Jon grunts.

“Says the man with the lumberjack beard.”

Martin's beard apparently flowered rambunctious after four months on T and never showed signs of abating. He can go from smooth-faced to a full shading of stubble in a day, flawless unpatchy coverage that Jon is a teeny bit jealous of.

“It's not _that _bad,” Martin says.

“You could keep small animals in it if you don't cut it soon. Nest for the birds.”

“You know what, maybe I _will._”

Martin deviously chooses this moment to weaponise his facial hair, rubbing it against Jon's neck as he angles in for a dry, cheeky kiss. Jon squirms and grumbles, but deigns to allow the attention.

He straightens, contented when Martin rubs his hands over the prickly, newly shorn fuzz.

“Better?” Martin asks, scratching his fingers against his scalp.

“Much,” Jon says, without elaborating, and smiles.


	22. paradigm shift

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On Martin's nightmares

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SPOILERS FOR EPISODE 161
> 
> (minor, but still there)
> 
> cws in the end notes.

The first night is the worst.

It is simple, maybe to forget the horror of the unexpected and the sudden, in the face of so much permanence. The world stained dark forever. The perpetual unwilling sacrifice of the Archivist, the knowledge and Knowledge that this is like a shouted word, a brutal punch, a vicious stab – action that changes something irrevocably.

The world ended. Has been ended. Perfect tense. Is still being ended, continuous. Ad infinitum.

The first night Martin dreams is not yet known as the first. Firsts aren't established as such. At this genesis, no on has been clued in that there is pattern, there is drudgery and monotony to be found in repetition, that there will ever be the cruellest of sunsets coming after the faint-lit hope of these three weeks of sunrise.

In the hours after the end of the world, Jon is insensate, overwhelmed and despairing. Martin is grieving, wading in the deceptively deep waters of shock, resolute that there must be something, god, this can't be it, Jon, this can't be the _end, _it _can't be_. They are both tormented at the snatched-away option of growing something gentle and organic and longed-for from the mire of their predicaments, the unravelling of a status cherished, laboured over and hard won. Frustrated at themselves, at each other, the way their outlooks complement momentarily reconfigured as colliding.

Martin's hands don't lose their steadiness though, no matter how much they shake. He stays awake through the night, rubbing Jon's back with a bruised, but not cracked, gentleness as Jon shudders and moans, buries his face into the pillow to see if it makes the sky quieter, wailing at the immensity of the world brought to bear on his shoulders.

Martin rubs circles against his spine, and speaks constantly, though he doesn't know quite what he's saying, what he's promising. Dawn finds them both waiting for something that this world will not bring them.

This is not the first night, not quite. Wait.

The next day, Martin rallies despite sleeplessness. A defiance of a human being, sapling-heart sprouted into an unyielding forest. He's a man who can build a home in a hurricane just by putting down one brick at a time. He boards windows to block out the sky, fixes locks, stores whatever food will last in protected areas. He leaves to check the car, but returns sharpish, shaking his head free from sparks and making a weak and quipping joke that stumbles off his tongue.

Jon tries. Red-eyed, hollow if not for the way this world fills him up with monstrosity, he answers when Martin speaks to him. He watches him, working himself sweaty and pink-faced, blocking the chimney flue so nothing can come down, and there's a weak but tender light in him that the winds can't blow out.

Martin's exhaustion fills him up until he overflows. It is Jon that ushers him to bed when he starts staggering on his feet.

“Sleep. Don't worry, I'll keep watch,” Jon says, and then, bitterly. “It's the only thing I can do, now.”

Martin curves like driftwood in his sleep, the sturdy branch of some great oak. It shouldn't ease things inside of Jon, but there is some muffling to the loudness, some tinge of the quiet that wreathes around Martin's bones that pervades the rest of the world around him.

It is almost, almost, reminiscent of peace.

And yet here comes the next surprise in this newborn world, huddled in the bones of it like a desiccating growth.

Martin's nightmares start after about half an hour.

On that first night, still painfully gleaming, unscratched and raw with newness, Jon doesn't know that this will become as habit. As muscle memory, the repeated battering of wind on window.

Martin grows restless at first, and this is old-habit, worn and elbow-patched methods to their nights, and Jon runs fingers through his hair to try and calm him, moulds their bodies closer in a way that sometimes helps.

His movements evolve into twitching that jerks his body in a shock, and he kicks weakly as if his limbs are not under his own control, keens at the back of his throat like a kicked dog. Jon shakes his shoulder, softly, saying 'Martin, wake up,' alarmed to watch tears begin to dampen his cheeks.

Martin's form wavers like a dropped signal, and Jon shakes him harsher, saying his name with the ghosts of those earlier, sharper days. Martin flinches, cows, flickers in and out, twists himself as though to shield himself from blows and still he is crying. The hairs on his arms standing, his breath shaky like there's not enough of it in his lungs, a rasping lung-deep quality to it. Jon keeps shaking him, and he can't keep the fear out of his voice now.

Martin doesn't wake up.

Eyes clenched closed, breathing laboured, and for a long while, Jon's world gets quieter as his own immediate louder fear rises like gall in his throat.

He tries compelling him even.

Jon doesn't know that this will happen every time Martin dreams. This rule has not yet been learned, this path not yet marked out. He thinks, agonisingly, that Martin has been taken from him, that he cannot reach him, that the world has stolen one last thing from him as he holds his crying, quaking only.

Martin starts screaming then.

Loud and high and terrified, over and over and over, and he's so _loud, _he won't stop, he won't stop, and Jon's begging now, almost hysterical, 'Martin, stop screaming, Martin, god, please, _please, _Martin, something will hear you, please stop screaming...'. He tries to hold his hand over his mouth to muffle him, when that doesn't work, clutches him in an almost smother against his chest, the sound wailing through him, thinking that he'll have to listen to this barbaric final fate, the last of the Archivist's assistants imprisoned and tortured in his own mind until Martin's voice gives out and turns his shrieking silent.

This lasts for hours. The world doesn't quite have days and nights any more. Jon loses track.

Martin wakes sweat-soaked, his throat ravaged, his limbs still snarled in the mechanics of terror, Jon rocking him in near-delirious mourning.

It takes hours of babbling, panicked platitudes for them both to calm down.

Martin tries to avoid sleep after that. His curse and ruthless kindness, being of course, that he is still human. Exhaustion takes him eventually in a way it will never take Jon again.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cws for nightmares, intense emotion states and implied grieving


	23. search party

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jon wakes up and Martin is gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nebulously set any time post-160, but no S5 spoilers. 
> 
> Content warnings in the end notes.

_Wake up. _

Jon breathes in a cold and smarting frost, and for a terrifying knee-jerk of a moment, he thinks the air panting and pluming from his mouth is fog.

The taste of Peter Lukas' last furies stick tacky under his tongue. This was a dream, slowly receding, but then the world has grown so dream-like lately.

Jon curls up, nightmare-knocked and blinded by the confusion of being awake, clenching the covers over him like a den, like a hibernation, and wonders why the bed is so cold, why the room is so marred with quiet.

_Wake up, _something tolls in him with the furious clatter of church bells, _wake up. _

Dread itches over his skin, like there is something small and gritty and scraping in his eye.

_ Wake up. _

Jon gasps, moans something that could be a 'no' as there is a sliding pulse and eyes pop open like boils on his skin, like the drip of hot wax skittering over the bruised and burned tapestry of his body, slit-shaped goat pupils expanding his vision panoramic.

The Eye wants to See something, and it will not take his exhaustion as excuse.

– _Something is absent from us –_

The impression slicks over him, the dense oil of it poorly pervading the water of him.

– _The front door was opened recently –   
  
– The temperature of the room has dropped three point two seven degrees –   
  
– Something is absent from us –   
  
– There is a cave twenty miles north-north-west and the ground surrounding it is sunken, subsumes the unwary that it draws to swim through ground they know is hard, their fingernails break and they choke on soil, beached and bloated with dirt in their lungs –   
  
– A bird in the far distance, whose beak has twisted and stretched like a pointed sabaton, it spears through bodies and laps at the blood with its hideous tongue as they writhe and bleed out, and tonight it has caught two people this way –   
  
– Something is absent from us – _

Jon opens his blinking, feeble human eyes. Feels around with his finger tips, feels the cool sheet to the right, the unoccupied imprint on the pillow.

Martin is not next to him.

“Martin?” he breathes out, hearing his damaged windpipe expel the sound with a laboured croak, like broken bellows. “Martin – christ – Martin? Martin?”

He cannot make a shout but he feels the intent of it as a build-up in his chest. He sits up, grinds his teeth down on a cry. His stomach concave with his fasting, battered with bruising. Martin dragged the creature off him and burnt his own palms in the process, impaling it on the molten tines of a garden fork, and all Jon had smelt was cooking meat as he'd been pulled to safety.

“Martin,” he says, and his legs, treacherous, traitorous, human, _weak, _give out under him as he tries to stand, his knees slamming painfully against the hard-wood flooring and his ever-stretching vision swimming.

_Martin Blackwood is not in the kitchen, nor the bathroom, nor any rooms of the house, _comes the tide of the voice.

– _A man thirty miles away was ripped apart five minutes ago by a woman who looked like his dead sister, and he didn't scream as it ate his offal. These are his final thoughts – _Marn? Marnie, but yea're dead, yea're dead Marn. –

– _Martin Blackwood is not in our sanctuary, our sepulchres, our dominion – _

– _We did not traverse his fog-knotted dreams tonight, nor skim our fingers through the surface of them to taste the sound of them –  
  
_Jon tries to shake his head free of Seeing for a moment, so he can think, croaks out another _Martin _that is dismissed and dispersed amongst the gloom of the house. It's not night, not really, not when there is no such thing any more, but it's the closest thing they get in this world.

His arms shake as he levers himself up again, hobbling on his neatly bandaged, fire-scoured leg. He almost drops for a second time, but catches himself on the post at the end of the bed, grimly forces himself back up.

– _Martin Blackwood did not leave us willingly – _

– _Martin Blackwood has been stolen – _

– _Martin Blackwood is thirty-three years old and six months and five days and he has told six people in his life that he loves them – _

“Tell me something useful,” Jon hisses, blinking away tears at the raw agony that doesn't serve to dull his mounting panic. “Tell me where he _is._”

Knowledge coats the inside of him like a slick, a spillage, a catastrophe far from land, and Jon grits his teeth as it strikes over him.

– _Martin Blackwood on foot could have travelled a distance of two point six eight miles maximum in all directions – _

– _Your last words before sleep were _you must be exhausted. _His last words before sleep were pressed against your hair, and they are the same words he prays against your scalp every night, _I love you. Stay safe. Sleep dreamless. _– _

– _There is a brook ten miles away that sings, and its waters are deceptively deep, shadows stretching out under the surface, waving like pondweed. – _

– _Martin Blackwood is whittling something for our birthday when he thinks we are asleep – _

“Useless,” Jon snarls at himself, almost sobbing at the inanity of it, how little help his curse can provide him, how little he can protect those in his care. He tugs the door open wider, wincing, gargling with a cry as it pours down his throat, into his lungs. “_Where...._”

Eyes bloom as he flounders, blossom as he drowns.

He Sees in a deluge.

– _Marija Blackwood kept his first tooth in an old ring box that they lost when they moved to London – _

– _Martin Blackwood's chances of surviving a direct attack from an suitably powered entity is less than fifteen percent – _

– _Martin Blackwood is talking to a man on the road who is not a man. Lured him from our borders, thinking he would be undefended – _

Jon is staggering into shoes, his movements punch-and-judy ragged, jerked on worn-down strings. Every motion tugs and tears at his injuries – _we could rip its statement from its pretence of lips, we are always so __hungry__ aren't we, and it has dared to steal from our hoard of one – _and Jon bites down a whimpering cry as he feels the burst and pop of more eyes that push forth, wavering and shimmering like ill-formed soap bubbles, that coalesce in the place of skin like frogspawn.

A limping run out of the door. The path down to the mud-track at the bottom of the stumpy hill is swathed in dark, but Jon's Eyes glower in black-light, splayed wide as moth patterns, and nothing will dare touch such an Avatar.

Jon's pained steps get faster. He stumbles, catches himself on dirt-ripped palms, drags himself up. The thing inside him that is both him and not him is uncaring for the agony of his body as it turns more of his skin to its purposes, as his edges become less, as he pours over himself in a slick of bubbling sight and more eyes flex open like the maws of sea anemones as he strives to see, to See.

Martin's back is to him when he gets to the lane at the bottom of the hill on which their cottage presides. He's decked in his pyjamas, the hem of them soaked with dew and grass-strains. His feet are muddy and scratched up from walking down this track unprotected.

He sways like he's dizzy. His body is shaking and he doesn't turn around.

“Look, Jon!” he says, sounding ever so pleased, if anything buoyed with delight, even though his voice creaks, even though his hands are curved into trembling fists. “It's – you won't believe it, look, it's Tim, he found us, all the way out here.”

The man who is not a man studies the archivist solemnly. There are enough pieces of him slotted together to make an inventory of a human body, though they are jumbled, ordered wrong. He smiles out of his stomach, a fat, gluttonous grin.

He is a metre from Martin, not making any motion closer. He is enjoying the taste of Martin's confused terror too much, savouring.

Jon's Eyes ring his body like an aperture. The last of his skin has flaked away for a final bulbous, flexing eye to join the gelatinous whole of his vision.

Martin laughs at a joke. It is far too high.

“No, I can't believe it either!” he says, looking at the thing that does not even mimic the appearance of Tim Stoker, whatever is being shoved into Martin's struggling brain. He is smiling, a big bright beaming curve of a thing, even though his eyes are beginning to well up with desperate despairing tears. “We thought, god, Tim, we thought you were dead, how did you – ?”

“Martin,” Jon murmurs out of a body part no longer a throat, rocking dazedly on his unsteady limbs. “Martin, turn away.”

“I – ” Martin replies, still smiling. His eyes won't turn away from the man who is not Tim, even as they widen in grief, and he swallows and more tears flow down his face. It is clearly impossible for him to follow the impulses of his own contorted brain. It is clear he is trying. “I – it's Tim, Jon.”

– _The Spiral cannot have Martin Blackwood – _

– _Martin Blackwood cannot come to harm – _

– _Martin Blackwood belongs to the Archives – _

“Martin,” the Archivist repeats with a gargle of hungry static. “**Turn away and don't look**.”

Martin closes his eyes as commanded, almost dropping as his legs are finally able to move.

The Archive takes its statement messily, hungrily. Gets it all over his pyjamas, Martin's feet, the spatted dirt of the road.

He is no longer starving.

“Jon – that – that was – ” Martin's holding a horrified sob in his throat. His shaking has worsened, and Jon is both sated and exhausted down to the marrow of him. He straightens out his leg, rubs at the newly healed skin at his throat, feeling the unsettling sensation of marbles rolling back under his skin.

“I thought,” he manages to gasp out, “Martin, god, I woke up and – ”

He doesn't manage to finish the sentence. Martin, shell-shocked, quaking, Martin, nods. Understands. Near falls against him as he buries his face into Jon's neck.

They lean on each other as they make their way back to the cottage.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: body horror, mental manipulation, implied graphic violence


	24. adaptations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Martin likes spiders, known Havers of Many Eyes. Jon is a known Haver of Many Eyes. Martin approves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> from a rather excellent galaxy-brained prompt on tumblr. 
> 
> If you're not a fan of eyeballs, this fluff might not be up your alley. Body horror, but like TMA-brand fluffy horror? idk ymmv. 
> 
> Set during the period of everything being mostly ok in episode 160.

“Let me have a look then?”

“Would you get – the dishes, you'll chip them!”

Jon's exclamation is weathered by endearment. Arms bind round him like a loose aperture, a sudsy grip pulled out of their small kitchen sink.

There's stubble against the nape of his neck.

“I just want to see,” Martin mimics petulance and Jon huffs a smirk.

“They are _my _eyeballs,” he responds primly, putting down a dry mug and picking up a plate to towel off.

“What's the point of having horror-bestowed physical improvements if you don't show them off?”

“I wouldn't call them physical improvements,” Jon harrumphs, but Martin butts the back of his neck with a scruffy scratch of his chin in an obvious _now stop that. _

“And I disagree,” Martin says, kissing the skin he's reddened. “I think they're cool.”

Jon makes another scoffing noise but Martin sees him preen. This is Martin's rather transparent master-plan. Since coming to the safehouse, Jon's tightly wound control has become a loose, slip-shod thing, and he doesn't always notice that his eyes have begun to replicate, split off like mitosis, or even simply form as a loose collection, doubling or tripling on his face. Martin will murmur to him after a nightmare, Jon scooped into the tight closure of his arms, and watch the faint moonlight glint off the wide and rounded orbs that wrap around his face like a crown. Will slyly, carefully and discreetly watch a marble-shaped circle rise like an island resurfacing from the depths on his scarred cheekbone, its brother slowly mirroring it on the other cheek when Jon tries to peek at Martin's poetry, more flocking to his face as Martin pushes him away and Jon cheekily tries again and a minor tussle is had, boyish and giddy with ease. The way they erupt on his face like water boiling when he's frustrated, angry.

It's knee-jerk, a side-effect of the being he is now. But Jon doesn't like it when Martin looks. Locks himself in the bathroom when he knows they've manifested, going quiet, asking to be excused, dealing with them like some sort of secret shame.

Martin doesn't want that. Not here. Not when they're both getting used to the fact they might finally be safe after everything.

“Not right _now _then,” Jon says, trying to gesture at the dishes, implying that Martin has a duty he is neglecting.

“I'm in no rush,” Martin says agreeably, and scrubs the growth on his cheek against Jon's neck one more time just to see him squirm and complain.

He gets his chance later. Jon, absorbed in an incredibly academic documentary about Ancient Mesopotamia, has all his eyes speckling open on his face, wide as owl pupils. Martin finds it entirely adorable, as Jon makes an appreciative 'hm' as some fusty woman in a suit-jacket and book-handling gloves drones on about particular pieces of craftwork found from archaeological digs, and two more eyeballs float up to the top of his head apparently so he can better appreciate the splendour of the ancient pottery.

None of this is interesting Martin's, and Jon's leaning on his arm so he can't exactly read, so he takes the furtive opportunity he's been granted to count Jon's rounded black-shot eyes as he sits attentive and entertained.

The two at the front are where human eyes might sit, flanked by decreasingly smaller shapes like a royal coronet. Two squatter ones sprout under the biggest ones, half-lidded like crescent moons. That's – _six, seven, eight – _he can see but he's pretty sure he can see the glint of some crouched by Jon's hairline like little led bulbs.

He innocently tries to play with Jon's hair under the pretence of pushing it away from his face.

Jon swivels around, clearly having none of it. All his eyes mould back into his skin like flattening plaster against a wall.

Martin groans.

“Now I have to start again,” he tsks, and Jon cocks his head. Martin's suddenly regained the entire focus of his attention, and it's a little bit like being caught in sudden, unblinking sunshine that he's been previously shaded from.

“Are you counting again?” Jon asks. Martin can't tell if he sounds put-out or not.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because you won't let me normally. And I like looking at them!”

Jon makes a face. His martyr-for-the-cause face. Martin takes great pleasure in displacing that expression as efficiently as possible whenever it arises.

“You don't think they're a bit... you know.”

“What?”

Jon sighs, as though irritable that Martin is not psychic. An eye pops up cheerily at the corner of his mouth. Jon grits his teeth. The eye winks out sharpish.

“_Spooky_,” he says finally, imbuing the word with the venomous distaste he feels it deserves.

“I think they're neat, honestly.” Martin says, treading carefully. He doesn't use the word cute. They're cute in the way spiders eyes are cute; a little bit unnerving, a magnificent piece of adaptation, just really nifty. Jon would not appreciate being called cute.

Jon pauses. Martin watches an extra cluster of eyes like conjoined freckles cautiously re-emerge above the surface of his skin.

“_Fine_,” he sighs out, and dutifully turns around so Martin can get a proper look at his mildly tense, oddly open expression.

Martin beams delighted.

He counts them out loud, starting at the larger ones that huddle near his forehead and upper cheeks, moving to the smaller slitted ones that ring round his face like those Christmas paper chains.

_Twelve, thirteen, fourteen. _

Wait.

Martin frowns. Goes back. Jon sits placidly, sighing as though enduring some great trial for Martin's sake and Martin's sake only. His multitude of eyes all focus on Martin expectantly.

He recounts the bigger ones.

_Eleven, twelve, thirteen..._

That one. The one cresting Jon's right cheekbone. That wasn't there before, he's sure of it, but he couldn't have missed it _twice. _

Jon makes sure Martin has sat back, grumbling and puzzled. Smirks.

Martin watches the eye adorning his cheekbone dip cheekily out of view and then resurface on his throat.

“That's cheating!” he says.

“You were up to thirteen,” Jon says as though he hasn't heard him, a schooled, butter-wouldn't-melt expression. He deliberately and wantonly loses two eyes only to replace them with a gleaming five more. “Chop, chop, Martin, I'm a busy man, can't sit here all day.”

Jon's eyes flex in and out in a mannerism almost like a wink.

“Come on!” Martin says, laughing at the absurdity of this man flashing his eldritch eyeballs at him, trying to hold Jon's face in his hands so he can properly count them out. “That's cheating, come on, let me – hold them still, would you – !” He makes a laughing exclamation of “_Jon, _that's _nasty!_” when Jon's eyes wilfully roll under his fingertips and he gets the gross impression of touching them, the sensation similar to hot and slightly damp marbles.

Jon's laugh is high and pleased with itself, and almost a giggle as Martin, disgruntled, wipes his fingers on his shirt, and then he's scrabbling back as Martin surges forward, making a face as though he's trying to kiss them. More eyes pulse delighted and happy out of his skin as he squirms and squeaks and tries to push Martin's face away.

“Martin! _Martin! _That's disgusting, honestly, who raised you – H-ha! Martin!”

Martin never does manage to count them all.


	25. legacies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Martin worries about being a father.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because this fic discusses and hinges on Jon and Martin's own upbringings, there are some content warnings in the chapter notes below. Take care of yourselves, folks.

Martin's done what he usually does when he needs space. Sure enough, Jon hears the heavy-handed tinkle of the summerhouse key being undocked from its moorings by the fridge, the thoughtless over-heated slam of the back door a moment later.

Jon gets Lewis settled eventually. Murmuring reassuring little promises as he rocks him, his arms growing achy with the solid weight, unhappy wails turning into a grizzling. Finally, _finally _these transition into sleepy yawns, sluggish-fisted waves of his tiny hands. Jon presses a tired but adoring peck against his forehead, smelling baby shampoo and talc. Once he's laid him down, he stays a moment, listening, watching the steady rotations of the night-light patterns leisurely sweep the room before he pockets the baby monitor, remembering to take off the slightly dribbled-on cloth draped over his shoulder to protect his shirt, all of which are by now mostly ruined and smelling of new parenthood.

He goes out into the garden. The light is on in the summerhouse, orangey light offset against the blanketing navy of the oncoming dusk. It's a shed with pretensions, really if they're both being honest with themselves. They store the gardening equipment and lawn mower right at the back, leaving just enough space inside to manoeuvre a squashed DIY-upholstered chair and a pokey desk, a battered old boot-fair find. Martin can barely stretch his legs out when he sits down, and he's been in the process of 'doing it up' for about five years, but he seems content to potter about in it, adding little things according to his own logic. He sometimes sits down outside of its doors in a wobbly-legged camping chair when the weather's warm and the sun catches that corner of the garden, scribbling in his notebook and squinting at the light, and reddening past sun-blushed and inevitably getting a lecture from Jon for neglecting to use sun-cream _again. _

Jon knocks on the door and steps in slowly.

Martin's hunched over when he goes inside, elbows on knees, the curve of his back broad and uncomfortable looking. He has his hands over his mouth, rubbing anxiously at the scratch of his beard. His expression is sullen and sunken, bearing the wrecks of his unhappiness on his face. He lets out a breath that wavers, overstays its welcome, structurally unsound and liable to collapse into teariness.

Martin gets red-faced when he's angry, blotchy around his throat. The slow-fade splotching pokes out from under his shirt like ivy rash.

“He's sleeping, finally,” Jon says quietly. “Out like a light.”

Martin nods heavily, hands still half covering his face. His breath spools out of him deep and ragged and coming undone.

The summerhouse is poorly designed for one, never mind two. Martin's cramped in the only chair, so Jon takes the summit of the folding step-stool on his left, polka-dotted in paint thanks to last year's re-visioning of the master bedroom.

He puts a hand against Martin's knee.

“It's alright – ” he starts, but Martin's shaking his head like shedding water, rubbing at his eyes.

“No,” he replies, voice scraped flat, dulled featureless. “Just – no. Don't _defend _me, Jon. It wasn't – it wasn't ok.”

“You're tired,” Jon establishes a defence. “We both are.”

“That's no excuse,” Martin says. “Losing my – losing my rag like that, it's not – it's just not.”

He looks like Jon feels. Frayed and tired and buzzing with emotions that seem too big for the both of them.

“Today was a rough one,” Jon says. “We knew it wouldn't be easy, you can't beat yourself up every time you put a step wrong.”

Lewis just wouldn't stop crying for anyone today. Restless when he would nap, tired and unhappy when he was awake, bringing half of it back up when Martin anxiously tried to feed him, pacing the living room exhausted when Jon had come in from work. It's not the first time like that, when there's no puzzle piece to unlock silence, when no amount of feeding or changing or playing will settle him. That's just how it goes with babies, Jon was told by the books, and the veteran parents, and the forums Martin had scoured before Lewis arrived,

Martin's just never reacted so poorly before.

“That's not – ” Martin says, stops. Pulls his hands away from his face, his eyes puffy.

He takes Jon's hand, still perched on his knee, laces their fingers together. Over the baby monitor, Jon can hear the soft untroubled in-and-out of their son breathing.

“I sounded like my dad,” Martin confesses finally. Fat tears well up and stagger down his tear-prickled cheeks. “I sounded _exactly _like him.”

“Martin...”

“I _frightened _him.”

“You raised your voice.”

“I shouldn't have – I was the adult in the situation, wasn't I?” Martin's fingers not currently tangled in union with Jon's go to scrunch against his scalp again. He's so brimming with a miserable shame he has no space to listen. “Lew, god, he's just a baby, he doesn't _understand, _he doesn't know what's going on, only that he's unhappy. A-a-and then he-he sees his dad getting mad, and of course, he cried louder, because he was _scared _of me.”

Martin wipes fruitlessly at his eyes with the soaked and snotty cuffs of his jumper.

“I can't be like my dad, Jon,” he croaks. His words waver at the end. “I couldn't take – _fuck, _I never want Lew to – he should never be frightened of me, never, what sort of parent would I be if – ”

His grip gets tighter, his voice more pained.

“But what if I am. Like him? Father like son, what if that's another legacy he saddled me with? A-and if I can't trust myself around my own _son_....”

“You aren't your father,” Jon interrupts. “You're _not, _Martin.”

“I wasn't in control...”

“You were.”

Jon had watched the horror overtake Martin's frustration like a tsunami making landfall as soon as the words left his mouth. He'd breathed out hard, his eyes gone wide, his arms still full of squalling, wailing baby, and then he'd passed Lewis over to Jon – still with such gentleness, holding him like some proffered treasure – and banished himself from the room.

“You were tired, and you reacted poorly,” Jon continues. “We... we're new at this. But as soon as – Martin, as soon as it happened, you – you walked away. You _love _Lewis. The minute you perceived yourself as a – a threat to that, rightly or wrongly, you got out of there because you couldn't bear the thought of him coming to harm.”

Jon wishes Martin would meet his eyes, but knows he doesn't have the reserves for it right now.

He lowers his voice.

“You want him safe and happy, we both do. And I don't – I don't think you could have said the same about your dad.”

Martin sniffs. Shakes his head. Looks at his own hands like he's seeing the heft of them for the first time, the way they dwarf in comparison to the small shape of their son's palm, and Jon's heart aches. For the histories he cannot change, doesn't know, will never Know, for the ingrained fears he can't help Martin dig up like weeds exposed to air.

He continues cautiously.

“Is this – this is not the first time, is it? That you've worried about this.”

Martin gives him a no through gesture.

“I want to be better than that,” Martin says. “I want him to have a – a better upbringing than what we were given. I don't want him to ever feel we don't love him.”

Jon gets it. In this shed with them are the absent weights of their younger selves, when other winds were allowed to fill up the hollows of them that love should have rushed into.

“I know.” Jon replies, and he does.

“Have you....” he asks slowly. “Have you talked to Siobhan? About your worries?”

“I – I will. Next session. Talk it through with her.”

Jon nods, squeezes Martin's hand with an encouraging tightness, and Martin gives a wet smile back, finally meeting his eyes again.

“You're doing great,” he says sincerely, softly. “I happen to think you're a fantastic dad.”

Jon knew he would be. Oh, Martin can be fussy and anxious, over-thinks things, but he'd prepared for Lewis' coming to live with them like a military operation; the months of preparation classes and home visits and assessments and finalising court orders. There's a pride in Jon, thick and clotting like crystallized honey, when he watches his husband and child together. To know that they are his.

Jon doesn't think he's ever been so in love, watching Martin cradle and babble at their son, making nonsense sounds and singing gibberish songs and pulling faces while carefully preparing his formula. Lewis staring big-eyed and fascinated at Martin, trying to grab at his briar-bush of red curls and push them into his mouth, making little cooing sounds and generally looking up at him like his dad was hanging the moon. Jon understands the feeling.

“You're biased,” Martin mumbles back.

“Of course,” Jon replies easily, and knocks his lips against Martin's temple in a soft expression of reassurance.

“Let's go back inside,” he suggests. “You can go check on him, I''ll put the kettle on, ok?”

Martin goes up to the nursery room, making sure to avoid the creaking bottom step. Jon turns the volume on the baby monitor down while he flicks on the kettle, rummages around for the last of the semi-skinned. Whatever Martin is saying to their son, it's private, knotted and laboured with its own burdens of histories.

Jon thinks of his own as he steeps the teabags.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for  
* implied historic child abuse / neglect (kept intentionally vague, but it's there)  
* mentions of therapy  
* emetophobia (brief mention of sick)


	26. bacchanal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jon and Martin buy cheap wine and get slaughtered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> set in that beautiful fallow field for fic between the end of 159 and all the heartbreak of 160. 
> 
> Let them be happy and have something nice.

His lips and teeth stained purplish, Jon finishes his drink with an extravagant flourish and beckons impatiently for the corkscrew. Martin's put it down somewhere, so by the time he's uncovered it from down the side of the sofa, Jon's sourced a new bottle, digging into the soft flesh of the cork with the metal implement Martin's passed over.

Their second evening in the safe house has wound down grim and blustery, the creak of the cottage like a laden floorboard, and Martin is discovering Jon drinks exactly like a uni student.

“We should play a game,” Jon proposes grandly and decisively, holding up a finger like he wants to illustrate a particularly salient point in a lecture.

“Like what?” Martin says, content to let the words form and fall out of his mouth lazily, half-moulded like a cushion against the back of the sofa. Like some indolent Caesar, he holds his mug out, shaking it at Jon until he gets the message. Jon gives himself a triumphant and satisfied nod when he manages to top up both of their mugs – there was no glasses in the cupboards that they've yet found, and Jon seems content to fill the mismatched mugs up like he's pouring tea – without spillage.

“Let's do questions,” Jon says, passing back Martin's topped-up drink. He's gone blotchy around his throat, but he fixes on Martin with wine-bright eyes, bearing one of those smiles on his face that Martin never knew could come so easily.

“Don't you have.... y-your omniscient mind powers f'that?” Martin says, squinting as Jon, who had _just _sat down and sunk against him, in a resolute gear-change becomes a spiky thing with a mission, all elbows as he pushes himself back up to a wavering stand before lurching in the direction of the kitchen cabinets.

“I'm serious!” Jon replies, making a god-awful clattering racket as he pushes aside cutlery and tin opener and spatulas from their home in the top drawer that apparently holds everything, either kitchen-related or not. Finally, with a little 'ah!', he brandishes like a dog-eared grail a grimy looking box of playing cards. “Daisy left these.”

“Makes a nice change from gaffer tape an' weirdly stained rope,” Martin burbles back, using the divinely-granted opportunity he's been bestowed to give Jon a shameless and fondly admiring once-over before Jon swivels around on the balls of his feet and Martin schools his expression mild and dopey. “Anyway, you want t' do questions, why don't we jus' play Never Have I Ever or summin'?”

Jon makes a face that is either currently remembering some beer-soaked student days or trying very hard to forget.

“My game's better,” he says, bee-lining back to his position squashed against Martin's stomach. He throws himself down heavily, and Martin gives a grunting, over-dramatic ooof as his favourite hedgehog-human elbows him while he reconfigures his seating. “'s fun.”

“You know the meaning of the word then?”

Jon sticks out his tongue. Martin tries to poke it with his finger, and Jon reels back with another one of those wine-laden expressions, earnest and open as a window.

“I want to know _everything _about you,” he says, struggling with finding the opening at the top of the pack, before he pauses, dutifully following up with a no-less sincere and concessionary: “But not if you don't want to.”

Martin takes the cards off him, not wanting to watch Jon martyr himself for hours trying to open something for the second time in as many days. (The jam was still unopened and apparently fused shut for later civilisations to one day come across. Martin had caught Jon trying to pop the seal with a knife and there had been words).

Jon sways and folds his limbs cross legged, body leaning towards Martin as he unpacks the cards into his palm.

“What questions then?”

Jon huffs.

“I'm not going to tell you, that's not the _game_.”

“What if you cheat though?”

“I won't!”

“'s what a cheater would say.”

“Martin...!”

“Tell y' what,” Martin grins, “Rules! You like those. Right – er – kay, if you use your ominous eye powers – ”

“I'm not going t – ”

“_If. _Then, then there's a penalty. 's fair, right?”

Jon grumbles another petulant 'not gonna' into his wine mug, the protestation echoing.

“I think...” Martin says slowly, blinking heavily, taking a big swig and sloshing it around his mouth. “...you should hafta take a drink.”

“I'm drinking anyway,” Jon replies impishly, with one of his own-brand smug expressions, and Martin shushes him with a shoulder-shove and a grinning '_another _drink then!'

Jon takes the cards out of Martin's hands, almost folds the lines in his forehead in concentration as he tries to shuffle them, and then promptly fans them all over the sofa.

“A-and!” Martin says with a pleased smirk. “A-and _I_ get another question!”

Jon makes the kind of sigh that implies he is possessed of saintly, near beatific patience for agreeing to such unreasonableness.

Martin leans forward and sloppily kisses Jon's hairline, and this seems to appease him. He tries to sit straighter up, fails and gives up up as a bad idea anyway.

The game is decided. It's simple and easy for their lubricated minds to parse – if a black card is turned over, Jon asks Martin a question. If a red, Martin asks Jon. Number cards are easier, more playful questions. Higher number cards and picture cards are more serious or personal questions. Any card can be refused at any time. Jon repeats this with an anxious frown until Martin nudges him with an elbow, sensing a spiral starting if he doesn't intervene, and demands the game be begun.

The rules go out of the window just as simply. Often they'll get tangled in the bramble-patch of some question, mouth full of reminiscences, clarifying or expanding questions batted back and forth like a casual and amenable round of badminton. But, equally likely, debate will spring up over the numerical value of the question and that will cheerfully eat up the time as they spiritedly disagree on what sorts of information is worth what number.

“_That's an eight at least, y' - you can't ask that until you've got at least an eight.”_

“_But I've not _got_ an eight, isa six.”_

“_Then tough, you better wait.”_

“_But you could tell me nooooww.”_

Jon draws a nine of spades, and spends an over-long amount of time pondering the question.

“C'mon, hurry up.” Martin nudges him with a socked toe, and takes another gulp of his rapidly depleting wine.

“I'm _thinking,_” Jon pouts.

Martin stretches out, yawning, and then awkwardly manoeuvres himself so he's on his back, half lying on Jon's crossed legs, the rest of him stuck out over the arm of the sofa to dangle.

“You look silly upside down,” he says, following the line of Jon's jaw, his vision getting a little less concrete now but perfectly happy to float in his tipsy haze for a while.

Jon trails a hand through Martin's hair rhythmically while he ponders.

“I've got – yeh, yeh, I've got one,” he says finally. “Ok, here you go, right – _when was your last relationship?_”

“I had a three-week fling about five years ago with a guy called Manoj,” Martin replies, loose-lipped, riding the easy slide of the words slicking out of his mouth. “He's some high-flying investment banker now. Not good boyfriend material, you know, but we kept in touch, text sometimes if we wanted to hook up.”

The static in Martin's head fades enough for him to frown and shake himself free of the urge that just swept him along.

“Shit,” Jon swear. Martin doesn't like the blank expression of horror that's begun to creep like ivy rash, pushing aside his reddening inebriation. _“Shit –_ Martin – I...”

“You're a cheat!” Martin declares quickly, efficiently sweeping all concerns about Jon's mild lapse from his mind in favour of smugly finger-pointing. “Cheat! That's – More wine! That's t'rules.”

“I – er.”

Martin's stumbling fingers reach down to the side of the sofa, and he sits up enough to fill Jon's mug again. It overflows a bit and drips on Jon's jeans and neither of them notice.

“You promised no mind powers,” he sing-songs, pushing the mug back at Jon.

Jon's expression seeps from heightened and horrified to a cautious mild embarrassment, and Martin feels a warm wash of a job accomplished.

“'was an accident,” he says as he sinks his face into the mug.

“Penalties are penalties.” Martin grins.

“You really have hook-ups with an investment banker?”

“Had. Past tense. Don't judge me.”

“I'm not – you can do what you like with your own body. Jus' they tend to be a bit...” Jon makes a most definitely judgy face.

“Stuck up?”

“I was going to try arrogant.”

“Maybe that's my type,” Martin says with a goofy wink, and Jon rolls his eyes. “And that was a _sip, Jonathan, _that's not a penalty.”

Jon drinks a little more. Martin bestows a graceless kiss against his cheek as a reward for his pains.

“And now my question,” Martin says.

Jon has the habit of drawing his eyebrows intensely together as he waits for each question, as though readying to give the enquiry the entirety of his attention.

“Alright. Go on.”

“Which one of my poems is your favourite?”

“I'm not answering that.”

“Why not?”

“_Martin..._”

“_Fine. _Another one. Non-morose answers only.” Martin bops Jon's nose. He's struggled through the reticence of his unruly limbs to sit up properly, and enjoys the fruits of his labours in that he can now more easily look at Jon while he's talking. “What do you wish you were better at?”

“Well, under such strict and unnecessary restrictions,” Jon says, who has taken advantage of Martin's more upright position to lean against him like a capsizing boat, his mug hugged against his breastbone. “Dunno. I've always quite liked the idea of – of getting into astronomy. There's all of the visually observable stuff, and it's fascinating, like it's – 't's really _cool_, the sorts of things you can see, even with reasonably cheap equipment, but then – then they've got this – this thing called radio astronomy, an' it's where you detect things like pulsars and stuff using radio waves, and it's really amazing, you know and – why're you smiling at me like that?”

“I'm dating such a _nerd_,” Martin laughs and fails to disguise how charmed he is, how wide his wine-stained lips are pulled. “That's adorable.”

“What about _you _then?” Jon says. He's going for affronted, but his hair is sprouting up fly-away, there's a strip of darkening skin over his nose and cheeks, and he has honest-to-god dimples that even his scruffy patch of beard doesn't mask when he smiles with his whole mouth. His happiness is a thoughtless, reckless thing and Martin thinks it's stunning. If he can figure out how to word it, he's definitely going to tell Jon, just blurt it out because Jon deserves to know, should be told how much his happiness means to Martin.

Jon swivels his body to drape his legs over Martin's knees, fidgets like a cat before he finally stills.

“Maybe baking?” Martin muses. He strokes the knobbly bone on the side of Jon's ankle, the skin fading smooth from the dark hair down his legs, and Jon twitches like he's ticklish. “I've never really...”

“Martin!” Jon says suddenly. Sitting up so fast in fact that he sloshes a blood-coloured stain onto his shirt.

“What?” Martin says, a buzz of threatened sobriety at whatever has broken their languid, lazy peace. Jon's putting his mug down and leaning forward.

“_Martin_,” he stresses again, and his face has filled up with a torch-bright light, dimples deepening. “There's flour in the kitchen. Martin, th-there's – I think there's... Eggs! We've eggs, 'n you got milk – let's make – let's make a cake!”

Martin blinks.

“What now?”

“Yeah, sure, now.”

Martin snorts.

“That oven's seen the Blitz, Jon! We'll need tetanus shots before we go near the thing.”

“N', n' it'll be fine, Daisy used it to make bread to disguise the smell of bleach.”

“God, that's not the ringing endorsement you think it is.”

“Hush, c'mon, let's go look,” Jon tries to stumble up and nearly drop-kicks his innocently placed mug. Martin breaks into a tipsy peal of laughter, squawks when Jon nearly collapses back onto him, almost headbutting him before he squashes his face with a petulant, slightly-off-the-mark kiss.

“Fine,” Martin half-slurs as Jon squirms, trying to separate them and drag Martin up from where he was entirety committed to being dug in for the evening. “F'ne, we'll look, kay, you pr'lly can't get rabies anyway with your mind powers.”

Jon staggers and nearly slips. Martin, feeling that it'll be better for all concerned if Jon is not allowed to do much walking for the moment, instead feels that now is a perfect moment to demonstrate every expression of chivalry he's always rather sappily wanted to shower a loved one with.

This firmly in mind, the idea growing better by the moment, Martin valiantly attempts to lift Jon in a wonky bridal carry.

Jon near shrieks with something that is both primal and delighted, but also rationally terrified: “Martin, your back!” Your back!”

“'s fine,” Martin grunts.

“You're going to do your back in!”

“If you keep squirming around, lemme get a good grip.”

“You're g-g-goin' to drop me, M-Martin!”

Tears are rolling down Jon's cheeks, his chest heaving in short-breathed gasping laughter that makes their small cramped living room seem bigger than it is. Martin does nearly drop him, but the sofa is still there for Martin to plant the hiccuping, giggling object of his devotions down upon safely. It takes a few minutes, but he convinces the leggy, laugh-shook drunkard he calls his own to clamber onto his back like a leggy koala, and this is more successful as Martin swayingly carries him into the kitchen.

(Their cakes are flat, lacking in sugar and near carbonated by the time they remember to take them out of the oven. Martin wakes up with Jon's hair in his mouth and a thundering pity-party of a headache made worse by Jon's snoring and he cannot for the life of him stop smiling).


	27. open and honest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _**major spoilers** for episode 166 - The Worms_
> 
> Episode tag - Jon and Martin clear the air

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This goes without saying that there are big spoilers for the newest episode (166)
> 
> Featuring the only thing sexier than destroying threatening doppelgängers with your laser eyes: open and honest communication.

Jon comes back from the graveyards of worms, his face pinched close like a winch-tight headache.

Martin stands from his perching spot on what might once have been a motorway crash barrier. Jon's eyes take a moment to reacquaint to Martin's face, all of their pupils swinging inward like a sudden compass pull to north, but he gives a surly shake of his head, assuming what Martin so obviously wants to say.

“Not now,” Jon says, the bite to his words made toothless with exhaustion. “I don't – I don't want to talk about...”

“Alright,” Martin interrupts him, and holds up his palms in an open-handed gesture. “It's... it's fine. Sorry I pushed you to explain things, before.”

“It's not...” Jon sighs out a breath he doesn't seem like he can spare. His body clenching in on itself like he's trying to fold himself up. He rubs the scrubby shorn hair at the back of his neck. “It's not... It's fine. You want, you want to understand. It's just hard, to find the words these days. But we're both... we're both here. In this _world _I made.” His face creases bitter. “And I don't mean to shut you out.”

“I know,” Martin replies. And he does. Knows how easily protectiveness can curdle stony and secretive, the words not said buried under your tongue, compacted as plaque behind your teeth. How fast the fog can seep in that way.

He made himself a well-versed amateur of such tactics under Peter's idle gaze.

Martin looks at the strung-up, over-wound image Jon makes, his stance on this sucking, lumpy ground like he doesn't know if he should be squaring for an argument or not.

Martin reaches to touch his arm, leaving soil-encrusted marks.

“We will talk about it,” he says, firmly but intentionally lighter. “I won't rush you, but you're right. It's... it's us now. Just the two of us. And the last thing we need is either of us not talking to each other. I can't promise I'll understand, Jon, but when you're up to it... Try? We don't have to agree, but we have to – we have to _talk._”

Jon nods. He curves his spine toward in a way Martin knows how to understand just fine, stepping into the space between them to slot their be-coated, bag-laden and mud-crusty bodies as one.

“I fucking hate the Buried,” Jon says into Martin's shoulder.

“It sucks,” Martin agrees. “You er – you have any more poetry this time?”

Martin feels Jon's 'no' like an earth tremor over his breastbone.

“Worms,” comes the reply muffled shapeless into his coat.

“Like...normal worms?”

“People worms.”

“Rrright. Less fun then.”

“Didn't know worms were fun to begin with.”

“A vital part of the soil ecosystem.”

Jon chuffs a fond noise, brings his arms around to seal them closer.

“Of course they are,” he replies quietly.

Martin lets them have this. In this world where there is no rest, where there is only the onwards and the relentless trudge towards, he settles his hands over Jon's wind-nipped ears and hopes that it muffles the squirming and the wailing of the pock-marked soil. Feels Jon's whole weight subsided against him, hopes he knows he can close his eyes here in the only sanctuary Martin can offer, just for a bit, just for a moment.

When Jon grunts and separates his face from where he's buried it against Martin, all his eyes blink sideways, filmy like a lizard.

“We carry on then?” he says.

“Before that,” Martin says slowly. “While you were... while you were monologuing, Annabelle called. You know she's got a Nokia?”

He feels Jon's unspooled tension wind right back up. Wishes he could have kept this a secret like before, spared him another weight slowly splintering the bones in his back. Knows that this world has been flayed skinless of its secrets. That Jon wouldn't, would never demand them from him, but that that's not how it can work any more. They can't have secrets, not if they want to survive this.

“Did you pick up the phone?” Jon asks.

“Yes.”

“Did... You talk to her?”

“Yes.”

Jon's eyes get brighter when he's stressed these days. The light strikes them odd, oversaturates the colour. Martin doesn't think Jon knows.

“You can't trust her!” he says, his voice rising frustrated, more than a little scared. “Martin, whatever she said, she...”

Martin knocks the top of Jon's head with his chin in mild admonishment.

“I _know _that,” he replies slightly. “I'm not daft.”

“We can't trust anyone,” Jon repeats churlishly, though the fire's trickled out of him a bit.

“Not even Helen?”

“_Especially _Helen,” Jon's face gets hard. “I don't....” He pauses, and it's obvious he's trying to word things more carefully to avoid confrontation. Helen is a point of disagreement neither of them feel like budging over. “I'm not comfortable. With how much you trust her. She's.... she's an avatar of lies, a-and deception and _trickery_, you can't believe – ”

“I don't believe her,” Martin defends. Less heated than he might have, not wanting to keelhaul this old argument. “And I sure as hell don't trust her. But we need allies Jon. You can't watch us all the time. There's no harm in keeping your enemies close, you know.”

“She's dangerous.”

“I know that. So are you. Why do you hate her so much?”

Jon sighs.

“I asked her to help me,” he says, words worn down like sea stones. “When Peter took you to the Panopticon. And she laughed in my face.”

Martin doesn't know how to respond to that, so he grasps Jon tighter for a moment.

“Rude.”

“Hmm,” Jon hums in agreement before he gives another world-worn exhalation of air. “Go on then. What did Annabelle say?”

Martin intends to treat her unsubtle and obvious play with the contempt he feels it deserves.

“Some vague bollocks about wanting to help us, needing someone on side, then a rather rude dig at how much of a burden I am to you. I put the phone down on her.”

He hears the tired delight in Jon's laugh.

“Good for you.”

The wailing around them is getting twisted up with the rising wind, and Martin shivers.

“Where to now then?” Martin asks. “Because I for one have had enough of people interrupting our noble quest for today.”

“A noble quest, is it?” Jon says with a small smirk as he pulls himself fully away.

“That's not what you'd call it, I'm guessing?”

“More an ominous trudge.”

“Menacing backpacking.”

“A sinister sight-seeing tour of the apocalypse.”

“Complete with tour guide,” Martin nods. Jon's gestured a direction and they pick their way across the boggy ground.

“How do I rate?”

“One star. Very shoddy. Every time you want to go narrate at some worms, I get ditched to freeze in a corner. And you've not even seen _Kill Bill_.”

“It can't be that good.”

“_Jonathan, _listen to me very carefully....”

The bounce and return of their light-hearted dialogue is almost regular enough to block out the squirm of the soil and the wail of the entombed. Martin can be satisfied with that for now.


	28. pledge

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> minor spoilers for s5 up to 166.

Martin's world, after, now has narrowed into the journey ever towards. Broken into three parts of unequal importance.

His rucksack: laden, overstuffed for their foolhardy pilgrimage, which chafes the skin of his shoulders a sore and pebbling red. 

The Eye: above, ceaseless. He follows the varicose cross-circuits of veins with a half-interested gaze, like he might have idly mapped the intrusion of clouds before they lost the sky. 

Jon: unbowed, brisk, beloved, who always walks too fast for him. But who always stops, looks back, waits. A time-softened lilt to his teasing, a yielding hand as they steady each other over shambolic and sunken ground. 

Martin, a diligent tightrope walker, places heavy foot over heavy foot as they traverse this brave new world that has such people in it. He does not look down to witness what has been done to these people. 

He does not think about spiders. 

Martin holds his hands over his ears to block out Jon's dirges. When grief takes him as it sometimes does, his belated mourning, he holds his peace; when a lashing unfocused anger is stoked up in its stead, he holds his tongue and holds his temper and waits for the rocky unpredictabilities of his emotions to subside. 

He holds close the tended garden of his love now blossomed, flowered midst barren and overtaxed soil. Jon does not sleep but Martin cradles him anyway, and Jon curls against him and uses the lock of his arms as sanctuary, the hollow of his throat as confessional. 

He does not think about spiders. 

It is hard. To learn how the rigging is hoisted in this new twisting place, what way the sails face and following what winds. How unsafe the lighthouse in the far-off is. Men will draw monsters in their beastiaries when the new is relayed to them, and Martin does not have time to dwell on the monstrous these days. He is not frightened of the things he thought he would be. 

Martin does not think about spiders. 

(Except he does.) 

_Did you feel, _Jon had proposed delicately, _like she was influencing your mind at all? _

Jon's world has no certainties. No maps, boundaries, no promises that can remain unquestioned. 

Martin has the edges of his world now. He has to be able to trust in them. 

_This is me, _he thinks, lockjawed, belligerent, as he lays their unnecessary bedding on dormant ground for unclaimeable sleep, fussing over the pillows. Jon observes, sketch lines of fondness becoming inked in the longer Martin wages his petty war. _This is me doing this, not because some spider wants me to, this is me. And I can't know this so I have to believe it, I can't doubt it because otherwise we have lost. _

_This is me, _he tells himself, as he tells Jon of his adoration with prayerbook kisses and reverant touches and vestry silences. Performing his sacrements for Jon to witness, where he offers up his meagre lockbox of scavenged and scattered testimonials of a short life not always lived happily. He does not say I love you. It's too big. It can't fit in his mouth yet. He is learning that after the shipwreck, there is still the sea for him to survive and he still wakes sometimes banked in fog. 

_This is me, _he thinks for every stubborn step, every shouldering of his backpack, every suckling quicksand bank of terror, every soundscape devoted to the harvesting of the inexpressible. He has learned his spine has hardened to bear the unbearable, and he moulds his hand against Jon's as they traverse through the unhallowed ossuaries of the world. 

When he smiles at Jon, he consciously, deliberately smiles like the world hasn't ended for him just yet. He looks at the tapestry of ruin wrought upon a wretched man whose greatest bravery is now to carry on, and knows he will shadow each of his steps until the end. 

_This is me_, he knows. And he sticks stubborn flags in the soil of his selfhood and refuses for doubt to grow further in the loam of him. 

When Annabelle calls again, he does not answer the phone. 


	29. battlefronts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt: I’ve been thinking about Jon getting hurt during the apocalypse and trying to hide it from Martin in a manner very similar to what he warned Martin not to do to him. 
> 
> Mild content warnings, nothing graphic, but detailed in the end notes.

It's been a long two days.

Jon's breathing is hard-won, gravel-scraping up a dry and scream-torn throat. If he is sleeping, and Martin can't tell, even now if that's what to call it when the Archive's Eyes are closed, his head is mercifully free of dreams.

Martin's hands are sweat-lathered, muscles taut with a wired and overworked exhaustion. The scabs on his arms are itching from where Jon's blunted, gnawed nails dug and scored in a senseless panic, as the rest of his body convulsed, set upon some feverish pyre.

Martin doesn't even think Jon knew who he was. Doesn't know how long it will take for Jon to claw himself back.

It's been a long two days, but then days don't exist any more, so maybe he's getting the times wrong again. Martin shakes his shaggy head free from the dizziness building up, dust and grime clogging the smooth-running of him, adjusts his tremulous hold on the cricket bat, already soiled and discoloured dark along its edge. The sky hasn't taken on a night-pall since the world crashed sideways; it's the perpetual grey of an un-tuned station, studded with the great flexing, conjoining, bifurcating pupils that are now all staring at their beleaguered Archivist as he sweats and burns and cries out and whatever Martin can do for him, it is clearly not enough.

They'd thought it was the Hunt when it had attacked. Slaughter at a push. Jon had cast his face in a dissatisfied, pained expression, bemoaning his own slowness as Martin disinfected the snag-toothed wound of the now decimated beast, cleaning off the blood as thoroughly as possible, bandaging the area as Jon shook jittery with adrenaline and pain they'd no remedy for.

It was clearly sore to walk on. Jon had grunted as he stood, waved off Martin's fussing, trying to grind down any insurrection of his body even as they went mud-trudge slow across the vacant domain.

He'd grown ashen as his steps lost their stride and turned to shuffling. Martin had been the one to set his jaw and put his foot down, setting up camp in that nether-grey of something that would never be night again, shoring his spine with his own brand of stubbornness. Jon had agreed, but clearly not happy about their lack of progress, and they compromised on resting for a few hours, see if Jon's body would heal the injury on its own.

When Martin had asked Jon later if he was feeling better, Jon had said yes. Had said it was all healed up even as he shouldered his backpack, that they should really get moving. Martin had made a quip about Jon's super healing abilities and Jon had, he'd smiled like he was in on the joke, hadn't he?

Jon had said he was fine, and Martin believed him because he trusted him to tell him the truth.

They'd walked and walked through mire and moor and Jon had ploughed on, hadn't winced and stumbled. He'd been _quiet, _but then there were days like that for the both of them, that wasn't – should Martin have said something? Had the lines around his eyes been tighter, had he turned away from Martin as they walked, had there been anything he'd failed to see? As they walked, when they set up camp and Martin had helped Jon with the zip that was always getting stuck on their sleeping bag, when Jon had encircled his arms bodily around Martin and grunted a weary goodnight.

Martin had tussled free from the greedy, fog-banked maw of his nightmares to Jon panting and spasming next to him. Eyes all open, pocked across his body like boils, rolling sightless, his pupils shot wide in the damp frame of his skin, frothing spit at the corners of his mouth. His skin shiny, fish-scaling with sweat, his outward front of humanity losing ground as his flesh becomes more eyes than skin, his voice crackling like corrupted tape, his words, when they slicked garbled and gibberish from his lips, all stolen from other people's tragedies.

He throws his body around storm-wrecked and insensate, and he burns when Martin puts a hand to his forehead, and he won't wake, not for Martin's calls and shakes, not for anything.

When Martin goes to check, the wound on his leg has rooted from ankle to thigh, festering rot-black branches of something sludgy and swollen and varicose tracing the same lines as his veins.

The Corruption wars with Beholding upon the battleground of its Archive, and there is nothing Martin can do.

Their camp transitions to medical bay, but Martin is not a doctor. He tries to use the limited water they have to quench the fire-brand heat across Jon's skin; Jon flinching and fighting every pathetic gesture to comfort. Martin's mouth runs itself down shushing and failing to soothe his scalding delirium, Jon who sheds tears and pleads forgiveness and begs mercy for those he has lost. The dark lichen that is ensnaring the veins of his hip, his stomach grants him the cruelty of being able to see his burden of ghosts made material before him.

He cries at whatever Tim says to him. He tries to follow a phantom Sasha from the tent, struggles against Martin as he tries to keep him from walking out, from hurting himself more, Jon's slurring words barely understandable but for his moaning desperation that slips into anger for Martin to _let go, it's Sasha, Martin, let me go, Martin!_

He scratches and bites and Martin makes himself immovable, insurmountable. Jon's struggles always boil down to a grief-drowned sobbing eventually, and Martin can carry him limbless and half-collapsed back to bed.

Martin treats the yellow-weeping wound with what little antibiotic ointments they packed, cleans the swollen, reddened skin, and Jon wavers between the ghosts and shadows of his lying brain. Martin prefers the tearful, mourning Jon in some ways, because at least, there, in some ways, he at least remembers who Martin is, even if he might as well be as wraith-like as his hauntings.

It is better than Jon's terror.

When Martin looms large and unknown over him, Jon's legs scatter to push away. His eyes recognising nothing, staring up at him with suspicion. Jon's body has not been kindly used, these past years, and Jon won't let him touch his wound, kicks and pushes him away, tries to run even as his legs give under him. When every question is laced with the command of the Archive, and the compulsion tears answers Martin didn't want to give from his throat, the static in his head too much like Elias' violation and still Jon is panicking, asking his questions and not understanding the answers, and Martin dutifully retches up every horror Jon wants to be privy to, even if he's not sure it's only Jon asking, it's only Jon who wants to know any more.

Martin's body heaves up every unwanted honesty, peppering them with hysterical apologies of his own as he holds his hands over Jon's mouth to gag him, muffling the sound painfully as he presses his hands to clench Jon's jaw to immobile, even as Jon fights him, even as every eye stares and finds him wanting.

Martin is exhausted being a prison, of being so held as hated in the eyes of someone he knows loves him. But one of them has to be stronger now. Martin has never wanted to think of Jon as dangerous, but he watches the eyes grow rounded and alert as they feed on his dredged up horrors, the static ringing howling and hungry in his head. He's not entirely sure Jon will be able to stop himself from going too far.

When Jon calms, slips back into fever-dreams, there are bruises in the shape of fingertips around his mouth, and Martin can hardly bear to look at them.

The roots have receded their front lines, the puncture wounds puckered smaller when Martin checks again, and he can't look at that either.

It has been a long two days.

Jon's shivering has settled now. He rocks and frowns and breathes shallowly, but he doesn't bawl and sob names at the air. He doesn't try and ask any more questions. His fever broken, Martin thinks he's dream-walking again, for the roots continue their retreat steadily, the Archive feeding somehow.

Some pawing, creeping things have chanced their luck at an embattled, weakened Archive, and Martin's responsibility teeters between nurse and soldier. He's not a good fighter, but he's desperate for them both to survive this and that serves him well enough. There's blood scoring a bandoleer down and over his shoulder, a crest of viscera coating his shirt from some misbegotten creature of worm and want. He can't put weight on his right foot properly. He is so so tired, but still he sits, half folded, his grisly cricket bat over his knee, directly in front of the open mouth of their tent and the dreaming Jon, whose eyes scatter misted and blind under his eyelids.

Jon returns as Jon maybe a day later. Disorientated, groaning as he sits up, only two eyes in his head again. He calls out Martin's name, dry-throated, in his own voice again. He sounds sluggish and cautious. Not accusatory or betrayed or scared.

Martin kneels down by the sleeping bag, checking the untroubled skin of his calf is free from wound or infection. Jon's eyes are staring at him, nervy, over-bright, but he ignores them for the moment. Exhaustion has sanded down all his edges; he doesn't have the energy he wants for his anger, not yet, not when the worry has yet to pass from his system.

“How long was I, um, out of it?” Jon asks slowly. He looks uncomfortable. The tent is permeated with the unflattering smell of sickness and blood, both of which he has noticed if the slight wince in his expression is anything to go by.

“Three days, I guess,” Martin throws out, packing up the medical supplies now he's sure they won't be needed any more. “Not that time works any more, but you know. Estimate.”

“My leg...?”

Jon has the good grace to look guilty, and Martin feels a petty, digging stab of satisfaction. Good. Good that he knows he fucked up there.

“It got infected,” he replies shortly, shoving the supplies down to the bottom of his rucksack, kicking some clothes in a bundle near the mouth of the tent. He'll fold them separately in a minute; they're going to need to be cleaned at the next place they find water. “The thing that bit you, I think it must have already been aligned to Corruption, or whatever.”

“Ah. Right.”

“Yeah.”

“...Martin?” Jon's voice is low and tentative. He looks as weak as Martin feels. Martin closes his eyes, because he can feel what is coming, and he can't do this, not now, not with his thread-bare temper, the panic that's not unknotted from his bones. “Martin, why won't you look at me?”

Martin straightens from his hunch. Breathes out long and hard through his nose. Turns.

“Better?” he asks. He knows it comes out as a snap.

Jon's eyes go wide as they properly take him in, a blood-tainted furious wash-out of a man.

“You're hurt,” he breathes out, looking at the marks left by things Martin didn't kill fast enough, the little smarting wounds Jon dug in himself in his terror.

Martin wants to snarl at Jon to stop looking at him.

He doesn't.

“Yes,” Martin replies instead.

Jon's hands are taking on gestures of panic.

“Martin, will you – God, s-sit down, I-I-I'll get the medical supplies, take a look at them, make sure they're nothing – ”

“No,” Martin says. He's struggling to remain impartial, to remember how to be gentle to those he wants to treat gently. He breathes out another jagged exhale. “No. I'll sort them myself.”

Jon's pushing himself up to standing, staring critically at the disastrous image Martin makes, motioning to the rucksack.

“If you just let me – ”

“No,” Martin snaps. “No, I _don't _want you to help me, alright? What I _want_, ok, is to make sure you're all healed, and then I want as close to a bath as I can get in this bloody hellscape, and then I want to get some fucking sleep for a bit. That at the moment, that is the limit of what I am capable to wanting.”

There's a tense pause.

“You're angry at me,” Jon says in a small voice.

“Ten points there, Jon, _really _perceptive,” Martin snarks back. He can't look at Jon because he knows that would have stung, and he knows he wanted it to, wanted Jon to know a fraction of how much these last few days have _hurt. _

“Because I didn't tell you about my leg?”

“Oh, I'm not sure. Do you _think _that's possibly something I might be a bit upset about?”

“Martin...”

“If you're going to – to give me excuses, I don't want to hear them. Of course I'm upset! I'm _furious _actually. Because you _told _me it was fine. You told me it was healed, and I _trusted _you to tell me the truth, because unlike _you, _Jon, I can't read people's bloody minds, s-so trusting you is all I have to go on. _Apparently _that was asking too much from you.”

Jon flinches at that. Martin bites his tongue so hard it hurts, and tells himself that Jon deserves his honesty, not, never his cruelty. That this is not the man he wants to be.

“I am angry,” he repeats, deliberately quieter. “And we will talk about it later. But I – I cannot deal with it right now. Not without saying something I'll regret. So I want you to drop it, and just – leave me alone for a bit.”

Jon nods jerkily, looking cowed and miserable.

“Alright,” he says. “Alright, I'll – er, go, have a scout around for any water?”

It's as open an offer for space as Martin's going to get.

Martin must have collapsed because he wakes up with his shirt still starchy with blood what must be hours later. He blinks, turns over, groaning at his protesting muscles. Jon's eyes immediately swivel to him from the other side of the tent.

“You fell asleep,” he says quietly. He's clearly been sitting nearby, waiting for Martin to open his eyes. “I didn't want to – There's a stream, not too far, and I, um got water, if you want to wash... I've used some, so it's er, it's safe, and I've, er boiled it in case of, er bacteria and things. I'll – I'll get it and then give you some privacy....”

He's stumbling up. Martin reaches out a scratch-marked hand, and murmurs 'Jon'.

He doesn't know what he wants. He feels gross and sluggish and wrung-out empty, and the ashes of his anger are still embers he could stoke into expression.

Jon lingers. Looks from Martin's eyes to Martin's outstretched hand. He still has bruises the shape of fingertips near the side of his mouth, and he strikes an ill, frail figure in this light.

Martin's had enough of Jon looking scared of him these past few days.

Martin repeats his name.

Jon comes over. Kneels down where Martin has sat up so they're almost the same height.

Martin's hand settles on Jon's wrist, and he exhales shakily.

“Why didn't you tell me something was wrong?” Martin asks. This is not the question he wants to ask. The question sat poisonous behind his teeth is _why didn't you trust me enough to tell me the truth? _Neither of them can stomach that sort of question right now.

“I thought it would go away on its own,” Jon replies, shame coating his words. “I thought I could handle it. I didn't want you worrying.”

_I worry anyway, _Martin does not say. Does not need to.

“You were so sick,” Martin whispers instead. “You were so sick and you weren't getting better for such a long time, a-and there was nothing I could do but watch.”

“I'm sorry,” Jon says. “God, Martin, I – I'm sorry.”

“I know you are,” Martin replies quietly. “I know.”

Martin might offer up forgiveness if he wasn't so tired. His head so thick with all the things he is powerless against in this world.

“Let me,” Jon says, at Martin's side. His fingers hover over Martin's shoulder. “Let me, please.”

Martin nods.

Jon helps him strip out of the disgusting, blood-ruined armour he's been stewing in. His movements are faltering but methodical, light-fingered and exploratory. He soaks a cloth in water that's cooling down from boiling, dabs at every small mark scattered like anvil sparks across Martin's chest, his arms, the deeper wound at his shoulder that's begun to blossom with bruising. His eyes keep flicking to Martin's face, like he's double-checking something.

Martin, for his part, turns dozy and biddable, straining to keep conscious while Jon apparently tries to put plasters over every single mark on his body.

“What did this?” Jon finally asks as he presses gauze to the slash over his shoulder.

Martin blinks slowly, rouses.

“The usual,” he says. “Bunch'a monster things, wantin' to take a bite out of you.”

Jon hums.

“I saw what was left of the cricket bat,” he says. “Very gallant of you.”

Martin huffs a laugh. Jon continues wiping the grime and dirt down from Martin's arms, stopping every once in a while to soak and wring out his cloth.

“What did this?” he asks again, peering at the imprints where fingers wrapped around the meat of Martin's arm and tightened, the crescent curve dig of nails.

Martin thinks about lying, but he doesn't have the strength. He can't shoulder it, and neither of them should have to. Secrets have never served either of them very well.

“You,” he replies, lowly. “You were, you were feverish, you didn't know what was happening.”

“I didn't...?” Jon starts, but then he reaches up, touches his own bruise-marked jaw with a dawning realisation.

“I hurt you,” he says, slow and horrified.

Martin remembers every horror and honesty the Eye dragged from his unwilling throat to bolster the crumbling body of its Avatar, and murmurs: “You didn't mean to.”

He doesn't say that he thinks it helped. He doesn't say that if anything like this happens again, it'll be an option. He doesn't think Jon wants to hear that right now.

Jon pulls away as his mouth shapes another sorry, but Martin cuts him off, enfolds his arms around his scarecrow limbs and buries his face in Jon's throat. After a moment, Jon's trembling arms complete the circuit.

“You can't do this again,” Martin says, throat thick. “I can't – I can't do this on my own. I can't do this if you don't trust me.”

“I do,” Jon breathes in, damp and hitching. “I do trust you, I'm – I'm sorry. Martin, I'm sorry. You're not on your own. It won't happen again, I-I promise, it won't.”

They spend a long time holding each other up in that small, cramped tent, murmuring promises this life might not let them keep.

Martin crushes down the cynicism this world has tried to teach him, and chooses to believe in every single one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for:  
* mild descriptions of infection / injury  
* non-consensual compulsion


	30. recovery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was easier, Martin thinks, when he could just blame it on the Lonely.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings apply surrounding issues of mental health, please see end notes.

“_The Lonely's really got you, hasn't it?”_

“_You know, I think it always did,” _he'd said.

It hadn't been a lie, though many things had been, during that time. It hadn't been a lie, and that meant a longevity to the roots of this twisting, draining vine tunnelled deep into him; that meant even when Jon pulled its stalks out, vicious and blood-soaked, the weeds of it returned like moon-pulled tide.

It's not the Lonely that grips him these days. There's no fog now, not in that eldritch-touched lessening of himself, sacrificial and closeted, something he could draw power from in his own manipulated way. There's no fog now, but Martin learned its lessons and tricks from earlier more-mundane masters of his will; it's not fog, nor mist, nor a blanching in-gasp of sea air. But it might as well be for how little it differs.

Martin shifts. His body curdling in the heat of the duvet. He's been staring out for a while, one eye blocked by his pillow. He doesn't see the watery promise of a curved horizon past the shoreline. He sees his bedside table, his reading glasses, his untouched book, the glass of water he sipped at to rid his mouth of a cracking, parched dryness, the patch of colour he hasn't quite painted right on the bedroom wall.

No fog, but his head is over-heavy like he's inhaled the muffling waves of it and it's risen in the pores of him like claggy summer air; no fog but his thoughts are dull, scattered, encased in ice too slick for his grasping hands to clutch to, and these things were never just the Lonely, he knows, not in the easy way he wished them to be.

He took the white oval tablet earlier. Jon made tea and gave Martin a kiss over his ear when he'd swallowed a mouthful and the little pill both, asked him if he wanted breakfast. Martin had said not now, that he'd have something later, that he'd get up in a bit, that he was just tired this morning, and it didn't matter if he'd been lying or not because Jon had nodded and kissed him again, and said 'ok', left him with a squeeze to his arm to fall back asleep again.

Martin hasn't gone back to sleep. He's been lying here, his own body insurmountable, watching the fabric of the curtains in the other corner of the room lighten, the thickening knife-slice of illumination slivering the duvet, bold in the dim pall of the room. It's not tiredness in the same way, he knows. He's lived this enough to know that his _tired _is not Jon's _tired, _that these words don't translate well but he's no better language to express himself. It's a marrow-thick, gnawed-bone sensation, like being buried in a shallow grave, still able to feel the cruel potential of daylight near above. A flatness to his voice, a weight to the edge of his smile, to the holding up his head. Steel-wire brain and a dimming of him like the light in the room.

He knows one tablet isn't going to pull back the curtains for him. Not today's, yesterday's, the day before's, the day before's. They were trying a new prescription, one that doesn't make Martin feel bloated and thick-mouthed, doesn't give him a tremor in his hands. Jon had sat outside the GP's office as Martin and the doctor had talked, and Martin knows exactly what a picture he would have made; swinging his legs and scuffing his shoes, picking at his nails and fiddling with his engagement ring as he'd waited gracelessly.

He'd nudged a hand against the back of Martin's as they went to go and pick up the prescription. Had diligently filled in the silences when he knew Martin couldn't. When Martin had slid their hands together, the crows feet round Jon's eyes crinkled, and he'd squeezed back, and there hadn't been any more words that would have managed right then.

These things take time. To work, to settle, to stop warring with his own unbalanced biology.

It'll take time for Martin to feel like letting the day in.

There's a knock on the door. A steady, deliberately quiet 'tap-tap-tap'.

Martin blinks. Responds in a slowed-down, underwater “yeah?”

Jon comes in. He's showered, dressed like he's going to work even though it's a Saturday. Peeking just under Jon's collar, Martin can see the scarred testament of the Hunt's knife over his throat. Knows the placing of every hurt and sacrifice of skin on the altar of Elias' former Archivist.

Martin's body is markless. He has a paper-cut-slight scar from mishandling a knife trying to cut pizza in his late teens, another one on his upper arm, a ghost of a thing, a meaningless burn from catching himself on the grill of an oven. Senseless, weightless wounds. He has no scars to prove how life has hurt him but they pain him in the same way Jon's skin takes up a phantom itch, they make him fumble in the same way as Jon's burn-strapped palm. They are no less for being invisible.

“How – ?” Jon starts, then frowns, then bites his lip, and Martin's heart, if it could muster anything, would swell at how hard he is trying. “Any better today?”

Martin shakes his head. He's learned, a clawed, dragged-up, hard laboured lesson, that it's ok to do that. That Jon doesn't expect his happiness when it's performative, that Jon won't think any less of him when he has nothing but empty palms to offer.

“Would you – ?” Jon says carefully, creeping further into the room. He's wearing Martin's slippers. Too big for him, slapping a little as he walks, the colours too kitsch for his more sedate tastes. “You don't need to get up, if you can't right now. Would you – would you like company? We don't have to talk.”

It takes a while for the words to dip below cloud clover, under fog bank, beneath the layer of shrouding mist.

Martin isn't sure what he wants. But he thinks he doesn't want to be alone.

“Stay?” he mumbles. Still staring at the poorly painted patch on the wall.

“'Course,” Jon replies. He makes his way over, round to the other side of the bed. There's a heavy flopping sound of Jon kicking off his slippers. The dip and grunt of the bedframe, the whine of springs, the huff of the duvet.

Jon's shirt-covered arms around Martin's pyjama-ed stomach, his forehead rested between Martin's shoulders.

After a minute, Martin reaches up. Holds Jon's hand in his, against his chest, pressing it there. Feeling the heat of it. How easily it was offered.

Martin's not on his own, and in this way, this blanketing all-too-human fog is not like the Lonely. Jon found him like he promised. Keeps finding him however far out across the beach he goes.

That means something. That helps.

“We'll stay here, for a while,” Jon says against his back. Patiently as snowdrift. “Until it's a bit lighter outside. Take as long as you need.”

It's hard to hold onto thoughts at the moment. But Martin can hold onto that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for:  
* depiction of depression, and portrayal of a depressive episode  
* hospitals  
* medication, particularly the side effects of anti-depressants.


	31. variants on a scenario

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> variants on a scenario, or: ten Martin Blackwoods walk into a house.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **HUGE SPOILERS FOR EPISODE 170**
> 
> jonmartin, one-sided Martin/The Lonely
> 
> Content warnings appropriate to the episode, detailed more in the end notes.

In every universe, eventually, he finds the house we've built for him.  
  


* * *

_  
1._

There is a smudge that copy-cats the shape of a man, and they wander the corridors. Sweep from room to room, dust-mote slow and purposeless. They are the colour of the wallpaper on our walls, and a sludgy heartbeat follows the metronome of our clock, and their eyes reflect back only the fog-rent vistas of our rooms. We cosset them in mist, give them the means to bury themselves forgotten.

They are not happy, but much happier. They are not safe, but much safer.

We have loved them like children love toys; loved to faded-ness, to sun-stained faint watercolour, to dereliction, dilapidation.

Once, the Avatar stalked past them in the corridor, shouting a name long rusted. The Avatar did not see them, and the man-shaped being didn't remember that was their name anyway.

It is better this way, we think.  
  


* * *

_  
2._

It is a poorly observed phenomena, how closely we ally with so many of the others. Seep in at the corner of their shades like a fading gradient. We are beloved of the Mother, The Choke, The Everchased. The One-Who-Sees has bordered us close-knit, and though its gifts of awful revelation and exposing the terrible as-it-is have never found much fertile soil with the Not-as-They-Should-Be, we at least have always been on pleasant terms with the Twisting Deceit.

The Stranger's lessons are in our fog, which refracts light and image like carnival mirrors. We build cliff-faces of falsehood, impassable paths bricked along with lies designed to distract, waylay, confuse.

_This is your house, _we whisper to him.

_You have always been here alone, _we promise.

We recite to our beloved that he has never been loved, and our winds, our walls, our winding mists tell him so often that eventually he believes us.

* * *

_  
3._

It is cruel. A kindness we had thought to spare him.

We tailored this room, these walls, this house for him to wear, fitted and befitting, yet he picks at the seams, rubs patches into the weft of us through the friction of his insistence.

He always remembers eventually. Cycles round in conversational fits and starts, spasms and shocks, frowning at the tape recorder in his hand. He always remembers, and the intrusion of the wanting Eye, like a splinter, a broken bone, a half-glimpsed glimmer through our fog, won't let him rest, won't allow him to drift away properly.

_Oh, hello there, _he will smile at the little recorder. And steadily, his numbness will recede to fear, his blankness to panic, his silence to desperate declarations of a selfhood we have long worked on eroding.

_Is this – this isn't my house, this can't be, why am I …. Jon! J-Jon, I'm here, I need you to find me Jon, please._

Before the realisation surges back out, gripless as tide. Memory washes away just as easily with the surf, we have found.

_Oh, hello there._

Round and round and round he goes. Ad infinitum. It would be kinder just to vanish.  
  


* * *

_  
4._

Sometimes we are lucky. Our traps snaring multiple.

After all, we have so many rooms going spare. Enough for both of them to join us.  
  


* * *

_  
5._

The feast we desire walks into our open mouth.

His hands are chilled, frost-touched, trembling; he is babbling because he is nervous, because he smells the brine and sea-breeze and chemical tang of hospitals, because he knows he is enclosed by our teeth.

He does not fall behind. He does not lose his grip, does not stray from the hallways, the corridors. Our fog clouds his ankles but he doesn't stumble.

He leaves us, holding his anchor like a talisman, and our jaws are left wanting and empty.  
  


* * *

_  
6._

He never chooses us willingly.

He never wants us, not like he did. He does not yearn for silences, for the world to be washed colourless and simple and painless, not like he used to.

It hurts, how often he rejects us.  
  


* * *

_  
7._

The Avatar rips the clock from the wall. Shatters chair legs, tears down the lining of wallpaper, the carpeting, colouring the air with the name of the one we have taken.

He Sees into the heart of us and still cannot find him.

He is furious, powerful, but he is also insensible with terror, mired in guilt and recrimination and loneliness, and this only serves to help us dig our teeth in. He may be king in this world but he cannot conquer tide. He never deserved him, he who we claimed long before, our tendrils deep-rooted, historical. We have had our beloved all his life.   
  


* * *

  
8.

_Not now, Martin._

_You're a bad son. You put her there, and she hates it, how could you do that to her, your own mother –_

_Not now, Martin._

_Useless. Forgetful. Clumsy. Loud._

_Shut up, Martin._

_Boring. Poor company. A placeholder for better friends._

_They're all better off without you._

We don't have to tell him many lies. Life taught him to lie to himself far better than we ever could.  
  


* * *

  
9.

He is a work in progress, work of art, our masterpiece.

Over time-honed hours we sand away the corners of his recollections. After-work drinks, and inside jokes, and drunken songs shared between three. We touch up the shading so his mind does not stray to remembering small triumphs, earned successes, hard won victories. We scrub at the stubborn stains of his mother's disdain, the gnawing panic left by a series of jobs that left him empty and frustrated and desperately trying to make the budget match up, the easy everyday dismissals he believed he deserved.

We sand off the more recently applied paint of carefully cultivated loves and wishes and hopes, the whitewash of acceptance he thought he could finally claim. The Archivist's love has upholstered parts of him we had already weakened, but we are patient, we have time aplenty to sow our seeds and watch our meadow flourish, and we toil and scrape and wear him down until we can see the raw wood of him peaking through.

When we have finished, we are the only thing he can ever remember being.  
  


* * *

  
10.

We know we have failed this time when he finds his name.

_I am Martin Blackwood, and I am not lonely anymore._

When he refuses to be quiet, when he shouts his value, his worth, the things that we have failed to wipe from him so they echo and shake our walls down.

_I am not lonely anymore. I have friends. I am in love. I will not forget, I will not._

He clears the borders of our domain with his head held high, his anchor walking by his side, and we know we have lost him for good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings:  
* mental degradation  
*possessive language and behaviour  
* gaslighting  
* depression and self-esteem issues.


	32. cruelty

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for @f0xesand0wls on tumblr, with the prompt: cruelty. Disclosure - this is more in line with the S5 that some folks were imagining before 161 aired, so this is absolutely canon non-compliant.
> 
> There are content warnings, please see end notes.

Two men stagger towards them, traversing the cold in the days after the end of the world.  
  
One trudges with a laboured limp, a step-and-stagger-and-drag poorly choreographed and clumsy. Their coat is adorned with histories of dirt and blood, their walking mired in the sort of eroding exhaustion that masquerades as a drunken stagger. Sound stutters out of them, framed as an under-breath babbling: _Come on, nearly there, come on, come on. _There’s another man too. Bigger, a dead-weight, half-slumped and deflated over the first one's shoulder like a leaking backpack. He doesn’t pick up his feet, but it’s too far away to see if it’s a corpse.  
  
The guard at the entrance of the shelter is decisive, fast and takes to the immediacy of this world because there were no other options, because it is the only thing that has kept her alive. She gestures to the other guard sharing her shift, and the call goes back to the main camp, an alert that is spiced with the very real possibility of ambush, trickery, of things being not as they seem.  
  
The guards move in tandem towards the newcomers, shouting warning and offering and peace inquiry. They have not turned many away. They gather the itinerant remaining, their camp gradually bloating bigger.

But they have turned away some. The over-lost, the changed, the too-late-to-be-saved.   
  
The travellers must have come from the rotting fields of what used to be north, charted through the bone gardens and the endless carousel and the ever-dark. The younger guard who has served this watch longer, she watches the slipping plough of the only one really doing the walking, how his steps falter and stop-start and slip, the the groan and curse and frustrated wail catching in his throat as he almost buckles. His limbs quaking from the effort of holding the both of them up. The other man sways like a gallows warning.   
  
It’s not until the first man looks up at their calls through a curtain of matted hair that she sees how _wrong _he looks.  
  
Whatever it is doesn’t have a face. There is an oval void, curved inwards into itself, dipped convex. The space where skin and flesh and muscle should be is broken up with twitching, bubbling gobbets of eyes that lump and spawn and meld and flex, their form like as though clay worked indifferently and lazily into a shape almost but never round. Some of the eyes are blood-crusted ink-black and sludgy, burst from some clawed violence, puffed closed.

Its surviving eyes do not blink in unison, do not follow each other’s trajectory. They dart and pulse like the inside of lava lamps, refract like insect lenses, inner eyelids sliding across with a milky cataract.  
  
When they all focus directly at her, she starts and raises her knife. Shouts a threat, angry at her momentary pity.  
  
The creature stops. Lurches. Rocks back and forth, its balance compromised.  
  
“Please,” it croaks out. “Please, help.”  
  
It sounds more human than expected. Its throat smoke-ruined. An accent there, English, she thinks, being so close to the border. Its hands, where streaks of what might have once been its skin peak through, are smirched with gristle and blood, the pond-weed straggle of its hair gone dark with the hues of it.  
  
“Please,” it repeats. “I’m not going to – help him, please.”  
  
“What the fuck are you?” she says. She does not lower her weapon. The knife in her hand has taken down more than this, but still it is clamped slick with sweat. The guard to her left has raised her own weapon.  
  
All of its eyes blink out of rhythm as its unseen mouth moves with that croaking, piteous whisper.  
  
“He’s, he’s _human, _he’s hurt and he needs – he’ll die, he needs a doctor please.”  
  
The man it is carrying looks human. Two eyes, a face that follows expected rules. Painted with dirt and filth, the slick of insects broken over his skin. His breathing is starting to rattle.

There are monsters in this new world that wear the fitting of humanity well enough.

The man has bloody lips and bloody teeth and a rag around his stomach holding his insides in.

“We have a doctor here,” she replies eventually.

“Please,” it repeats. Begs.   
  
She pauses. Raises her knife again, indicates her partner to follow suit.  
  
“Put him down slowly,” she instructs. “Then back away. OK?”  
  
It nods dazedly, pathetically grateful. Its bulging eyes swim and merge and split in its cavernous face. It unloads its burden with gentler motions than it looks capable of, lowering its reed-breath burden to the ground.  
  
“Shshshsh,” it murmurs. “I know, I know it hurts. ‘Little longer, you can do it, stay with me.”  
  
It attempts to straighten, move back as commanded. The man gasps and grips harder and won’t let go.  
  
“Jon,” exhales the wounded man. “_Jon_.”

“I'm not going anywhere, I'm right here.”

“D-d-don't – ” His plea winds down into a guttural bucking cough that flecks his lips red.   
  
The creature looks up at her. It does not have the features she needs to read its expression.

She shakes her head.  
  
“We’ll take him. Not you.”  
  
“J-jon.”  
  
“I-I’ll be right outside, alright, Martin? I’ll wait – I’ll be, I won’t leave.”  
  
It pulls their hold apart, cups its gruesome hand against the man’s cheek, mutters a few more spindling promises, and steps away. The man reaches to try and pull him back, saying the thing's name again, confused, and again, weaker, frightened. She can read the shattering expression on its face just fine now.

She gestures and after a moment, it shuffles back further. Its rolling, throbbing eyes watch the stretcher being bought, the trembling, pain-shocked man manoeuvred onto it; he gives a ripped-up cry as something broken is jostled and the creature starts forward knee-jerk as if to help, to soothe, but she raises her knife in warning and snaps a threat and it retreats with its fluttering, wringing hands.  
  
It doesn't move as the man is taken away. She knows it won't. 

She bolsters herself and looks at its freckling eyes dead on.

“You do not come any nearer. You either stay here peacefully or we will make you leave. If we see you any closer to the camp, I can't promise he'll be safe." Her words are not kind, but they are honest. The man on the stretcher is human-looking enough, but the company he keeps is all that's needed to sow distrust.

Its eyes pulse and flicker, but its neck shakes whatever classes as its face in a nod.   
  
“Take care of him?” it murmurs.  
  
She nods shortly. That is the only thing she will offer it. Her eyes still trained on its inhuman form, she leaves it a mournful sentinel in the wastelands as she retreats back to the shelter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings:  
\- dehumanisation  
\- the use of the pronoun 'it' to describe a person  
\- mild description of eye trauma  
\- body horror and a hell of a lot of eyes  
\- blood and injury


	33. cut

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another prompt fill for @f0xesand0wls - prompt: cut. 
> 
> I miss the OG Archive crew. In my head, Jon's being all Serious(tm) in another room, and in the next, it's about 40% doing their jobs and 60% shenanigans.

At least once a day from Tim's desk, there will be an 'argh', a wincing hiss sucked through teeth, followed predictably by a bitten-out swearword.

Tim's particular gift to the world and their office is his verbal flourishes, his Wildean turn of phrases, but this rarely translates to his cursing. He'll manage a 'bollocks', or 'oh _fuck you, _bloody tosser', or in one memorable outburst, 'oh cock it, you wank-bastard motherfucker', but his fury and the flash-fire of pain more often than not mushes his creativity into garbled raging strings of insensible expletives.

Whoever is closest, but usually Sasha, will give a sarcastic cheer at the outburst, to which Tim – gingerly cradling his injury, glowering with a fire-starter expression at whatever file or paper or fragment dealt the slicing blow – will reply: “Piss _off, _right, it's not funny, I'm cursed. This is a _curse._”

Originally, both Sasha and Martin kept boxes of plasters in their desk drawers, and it used to be a small competition to get their particular brand to Tim first. But Sasha's drawers over time have migrated to become a warning against the dangers of stationery hoarding, little getting found immediately without an expeditionary search, and it was argued by Sasha (agreed to with a huff by Martin) that this lent him an unfair advantage, so now Martin has been anointed the keeper of the plaster boxes (and the staples, and the first aid kit, and the pencil sharpeners).

Martin's drawers, disorganized and crammed as they appear at first glance, have their own befuddling and precise sense of internal logic. He can not only locate things within a few seconds of brow-furrowed perusing, but he is apparently somehow able to squirrel away in such limited space a bizarre collaboration of items that perplexingly end up coming in handy, including but not limited to screwdrivers, tea-light candles, old shoelaces and a door handle.

Martin will retrieve the neon plasters bought at a nearby Superdrug, lob it in a sailing arc to Sasha, and Sasha will shout 'Oi, Tim,' before chucking it more ruthlessly his way. Martin will have found the antiseptic wipes by then to pitch across the room; Tim will wave them off, Martin will gear up for a mini lecture on the dangers of infection, Tim will retort that his fingers aren't exactly going to fall off, are they, Martin's mini lecture will flower into a minor put-on snit, and Tim will roll his eyes and concede with a 'fine, _mother' _and open the packet.

The room for about thirty seconds will smell very strongly of rubbing alcohol.

“It's like having private healthcare, this,” Tim'll tease at the two of them, slapping the plaster around the papercut and waving his hand to show off the new addition to his multicoloured collection of war-wounds. By mid-week, he's usually managed the whole rainbow.

“Another job well done, Nurse Blackwood,” Sasha says primly, giving him an air high-five.

“The patient might just live, Nurse James,” Martin replies in a grave dour tone, returning it.

Tim will stick two fingers up at them, but he'll be smiling nonetheless.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Other unofficial office routines include:  
\- Sasha can never find her pen, the one pen she really likes to use, and everything ends up on hold while she upends things looking for it. 50% of the time, Tim's nicked it. The other 50%, it's been through the bun in her hair and been forgotten about.   
\- Martin is incapable of eating food at his desk without getting at least some of it on him. Tim has a semi-serious plan to buy him a personalised work bib.   
\- Tim always borrows other people's umbrellas on rainy days and never returns them and it drives Sasha up the WALL.


	34. shallow, fluttering

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sad-time hours for the OG Crew

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Posting two prompts in one chapter because they're thematically similar enough.
> 
> prompt: shallow - no spoilers  
prompt: fluttering - hurt/comfort S3 alternate timeline / canon adaptation from episode 99 (not explicit, but implied that Martin was taken by Orsinov, rather than Jon).

**shallow  
  
**

There could have been a day.

When Martin tumbled harried through the office door, puffing from the run, his expression painted peeved and agitated and his trouser legs splattered with the evidence of every Southbank puddle on his route. Ears reddened from another phone call where he had weakly stammered and shrank small under words he had never grown armour against. When Sasha flicked her glance up from her computer, the screen reflected luminous in her glasses, and asked, “You ok?”. When Martin swallowed down the easy dishonesty of yes, and mouthed a heartbroken no instead.

When Tim had stared gimlet-eyed out at nothing, one of the numerous circus tomes coating his fingertips dusty, clutching a biro white-knuckled, a set to his jaw and a grief in his throat. When Jon striding past and snarled in thought had looked up, for a moment, had taken in the tableau and asked, “Something wrong?”. When Tim had choked out a bitter and mourning yes rather than the plastering smile and learned recovery of a 'not at all, boss'.

When Jon had slumped, head in hands, wired with a scratch under his skin and a sleeplessness he couldn't shake, his desk a collage of a hundred monstrous terrors. When Martin tapped an anxious tattoo on the door before pushing inside, the tea circling spirals in the steam, and said: “Do you – can I, get you anything, is everything alright?”. When Jon had not snapped with a impatience set in like ivy, a rifle-sight suspicion reading every gesture as duplicity, and had lowered, had loosened his bricks enough to murmur a weary no.

There could have been a day, when they'd all just _talked._

It's comforting to imagine, maybe, that it might have turned out better.  
  


* * *

  
**fluttering**   
  


Martin is no one's first candidate for unshakeable. His potential capacity for sturdiness betrayed by anxious bones. Martin is pacing, foot-tapping, pencil-gnawing, nail-biting, button-fiddling. He'll twitch at dropped things or raised voices, his shoulders snapping ramrod at the click of a door opening. Guilty-looking and crime-less. Sasha used to – at least Tim thinks she did, thinks surely it must have been, but it's hard to tell if that's a memory spoiled by time and revelation – skulk behind Tim to prod him in the side to make him jolt in a laugh, squawk out a _'Sasha!',_ used to sling arms over shoulder, elbow him, throw balled-up post-its to snatch his attention, their relationship an exercise in easy physicality. With Martin, she'd done that once and he'd jumped and sloshed his tea and snapped _'Don't do that!_' and it would have been funny but his expression had gone sharp and strange and twisted pale, and Sasha had apologised and never done it again. He stammers when he's upset, his emotions pin-balling indecisive and spiralling.

Martin's no coward but his spine has been neglected to warp bent by a succession of inattentive gardeners, the places he's been cut back too viciously, where mildews and rots have been dismissed or ignored and left to grow stalk-deep. He does not grow oaken but willowy, pummelled and bow-backed by over-strong breezes. His eyes don't snag too long when someone meets his gaze.

Tim never believed that to be the essence of him for a moment. Had seen the long hours pouring over pages and pages to uncover triumphant the one date Sasha needed for statement corroboration. Had watched him set his back in stubbornness when Jon's tirades were banked unfounded, an excuse to be angry at someone, when Martin called him out on it. Had seen him coldly dig his heels in, when Tim's straining temper has clashed with Martin's refusals, when they bite and snipe and leave the air thick with the loose threads of unsolved argument. Witnessed the steady concrete blossoming of trust in their small surviving band, despite, well, everything. Tim would scoff and claim it naïve, but Martin's faith in others is a dogged slow-growth rooting in a long-fallow field, and he knows even as he despairs over it how hard-won it is.

Tim always thought Martin reliable. Unshakeable.

That even with their world collapsing that he was always going to be there.

And then he hadn't been. 

Martin's body is sedentary, a felled monument, a wound-down clock, and Tim cannot bear the regularity of it. He flounders in a marrow-deep sickness as he bears witness to the unchanging back-and-forth of routines, the checks from nurses at nine am, one pm, four pm. The bed next to Martin's is an elderly Trinidadian woman with dementia and a broken hip, who is visited without fail by a rotation of patient, fruit-wielding grandchildren. The bed on the opposite side has a woman who is only visited by the nurses to change the bandages over her skin graft. When they close the curtains around Martin's bedside to change his own extensive coverings, it takes just as long. Tim goes for a walk to the vending machine three wards along, fists clenched and breathing through his nose and wondering what else this awful fucking world might try and rip from him.

The visiting hours wind down by eight, and Tim delivers promises for tomorrow and a false-cheer farewell to Martin's still and machine-breathing edifice.

Jon doesn't visit the hospital. Hasn't since the first time. He's taken it badly. Tim isn't sure if he's surprised by that or not. His speech has staggered scatter-gun, his fingers tracing plans and plots and desperate schemes to make this right, to end the Circus and Orsinov and Breekon and Hope, to attain something that has all the tenor of revenge. Tim wants to tell him to sit the fuck down, to stop moving and hurting and blaming for one goddamn second.

Some old, withered up part of him wants to believe Jon can fix this.

Because Martin is so still, and Jon is never there and Tim needs one of them to not be falling apart.


	35. resplendent / hypnotic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mindless safehouse fluff

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two prompts from Tumblr. 
> 
> Some minor cws for depictions of sensory over-stimulation

**resplendent   
  
**

The muted sand-crunch and wave-murmur of the Lonely is a whisper in another room compared to the in-your-face cacophony of re-entry.

On the train to Edinburgh, Martin shudders raw-nerved and deafened; Jon's paid for the quiet coach, but still there is a woman mindlessly bouncing her leg up and down as she scrolls on her phone, chewing in thick and crunching bites a station-bought sandwich. Someone three rows behind them is clacking on laptop keys. Martin's pulled a coarse and scratching beanie hat over his eyes to block out the harsh strip light and still it creeps burning over his skin, his cold-nipped face. Every station announcement has him jolting and screwing up his eyes, though his gasps are unvoiced, soundless, and his vice-grip of Jon's hand is both painful and the only thing keeping him tethered to land.

Even the safehouse is a lot. The grass and stonework and wallpaper have their brightness turned up overblown and the floorboards moan with pressure at any motion, snap with a whiplash sound like a fire crackle when the temperature drops and the foundations settle. Jon jokes that it's a good thing he's such a rudimentary bachelor in his cooking – rice and pasta are some of the few things that Martin can keep down, anything stronger clotting in his throat. His woollen jumpers rub rough-shod and reddening like heat prickle over his arms and shoulders.

Sometimes Martin lies there on a surface he cannot settle on, eyes clenched shut in a darkened room and feels the world has swallowed him.

Some days though, when the tempest around him has dropped from squalling, Martin feels brave enough to look over at Jon. A dedicated watchman, a bulwark against the unkind outside, his breathing always the loudest thing in the room.

Martin takes him in piecemeal; the cloudy white of his scar-tissue, raised in a jagged terrain across his throat, smaller circular indents dripped up his face like droplets of cooking fat. How he catches a flat-toned hum at the base of his throat when he reads. The stately greying of his hair from the temples outwards, the wiry bristled scratch of it when Martin runs his fingers through the close cut. The heat of him furnace-warm after the chill of the Lonely, and some days, Martin can move into that, rather than away, and believe Jon's hush-whisper promises that this will pass, this will get better.

Martin lets the colour and bright and heat and sound of Jon encompass him and considers him the brightest thing in the midst of such a dull grey sky.  
  


* * *

**hypnotic **

The world drowns endless outside. A North Sea storm fussing past the coastline and pushing inland, the rain descending from tempestuous, grey-smocked clouds. Two days now, and the fields outside have shifted into squelching and boggy grasslands, the windows of the cottage slashed with throbbing and repeated assault, the wind rallying the downpour to an even greater fury.

Jon does not open his eyes. The air around him fuggy, coddled warm. His head cushioned on the pudgy round of Martin's stomach, his ears swamped with the dogged clatter of the rain. In harmony, a slow and deep inhale, an inevitable measured exhale that rumbles a moment later. The rain keeps waking Martin, that ill-rousing, murky half-waking, and Jon knows because the hands tussled in his hair move again lethargically, a half-committed rhythm of through and out and back that drops off as Martin's breathing slips back heavy, his fingers stilling.

Jon doesn't sleep much any more, but this rest is as close to peace as this world allows him. The hunger smarting at the bottom of his stomach like an set-in bruise is not louder than the stubborn battalion of the ceaseless rain, the breathing, soft and sure and in-and-out as tide, that sometimes tips over into a snuffling snore.

In this place, it is not so hard for Jon to believe that there is nothing beyond these walls but more rain.


	36. care-taking

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The whole 'there was only one bed thing' is always going to be great, but have you considered the inherent romanticism of there being only one mug.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for a prompt by @chaotic-carnifex back in November and I apparently forgot to post it here.

The first night, their motions follow a train-line of efficiency, unpacking, searching the rooms and in the crevices, not daring to release the air they’re holding in their lungs just yet. Jon almost maliciously cleans out all the spiderwebs that have flossed up into the corners of the ceiling. Martin checks and double-checks and checks the locks on the doors and windows.  
  
The last of the fumes holding his puttering form together ran out hours ago, and Martin dozes off in the dust-stuffed living room chair still holding Daisy’s lock-box of knives they found instead of a first aid kit in the cupboard under the stairs. When he wakes up, the box is gone and there’s something scratching against his nose. He moves his hand to touch the coat that’s been thrown over him, the outer side exposed to the evening sharply chill. Two coats, it turns out, the disjointed mismatching of sleeves tucked around him to avoid slipping in the night. There’s a tickling sensation by his ear that he reaches up to scratch at before he realises it’s a scarf that his head has dropped against.  
  
He lifts up his head from its impromptu pillow, the room broken up by low moonlight – and for a moment he is disorientated by just how dark the sliver of sky outside is. He feels bubbled by the space, and this moment spindles out in a muted and nonthreatening introspection he both knows and does not know. There’s no Lonely spilling out like a ghost on water in his chest.

There’s a charity shop mug on the booktable by the armchair, the glazing of the lip cracked a little. Martin thinks it might be water so ventures a sacrificial arm to the mercy of the night time air to retrieve it, taking a sip before he winces, realising it’s tea, long dropped cold and unappetising.

He puts it back down, and his expression has risen unbidden into something soft in the face of the harsh of the night.

Jon is snoring on the settee, dedicatedly preventing the seeping in of some insidious quiet even in sleep. His legs kicked out over the arm, a blanket half-wrapped around him, and he looks incredibly uncomfortable, gangling limbs contorting against the confines, his back propped up at an angle that will surely give him grief come morning.  
  
Martin wonders why Jon didn’t go upstairs. Take the bed. The cottage is an old crofter’s place, hosting two small and utilitarian bedrooms where they discarded their meagre belongings on arrival.

Martin looks at the tea. Feels the scarf folded under his head, the heavy coats weighing him down warm.

Thinks he might know why.

Jon’s a restless sleeper. Twitching and muttering, legs spasming like he’s running. But when he breathes in, the sound is regular, unpanicked. His snoring rhythmic, and _present _and there’s no mistaking how very not alone Martin is right now.

Martin falls back sleep with that thought.

The next day, Martin’s neck is stiff and Jon keeps rubbing his back, grumpy-faced and stretching when he thinks Martin isn’t looking, trying to pop some thing back into alignment. Martin chucks the now-grotty cup of tea down the sink first chance he gets, cleans the residue out, and puts the kettle on. He has a glass of water while he waits, and he makes a face at the hardness of it, the taste completely alien to his taste-buds so inured to the fluoride-dosed stuff that comes out of London taps.

There is only one mug because Daisy wasn’t exactly going to be sharing. He over-steeps the teabag until the steaming liquid is nearly pitch in colour, and adds a heaped teaspoon of white sugar.

Jon’s trying to bully the electronics in the radio by prodding them with a screwdriver bullishly and muttering. He gives Martin a long look when he sets the tea down by his elbow. He looks like he’s chewing the words over in his mouth.

“You know,” he starts, and then tries again, brushing a grey-dipped lock back behind his ear. “You don’t… I can make my own. You aren’t… You don’t need to.”

“I know,” Martin replies. Pushes it closer and wonders if Jon will get the hint. “You can make the next one, if you want.”

Jon pauses. Looks as if he’s about to stammer out a ‘yeah’ or a 'sure’ or an 'of course’ before he simply gives a small smile that trickles into the light of his eyes, and nods.

Martin gets a cup of tea about midday when he comes tramping in, scraping the soles of his shoes on the bristled welcome mat to clear the sticking mud, kicking off his wellies and shaking out the tumult of rain from his hair that decided to pay a thunderous and sopping visitation. Jon must have seen him coming, or maybe he Knew despite himself, for he fusses and helps Martin get his sodden coat off, gives him a towel to get the worst of the damp out. While he’s hanging the coat up, putting the towel on the clunking radiators, Martin goes into the kitchen. There’s a full mug by the newly adjusted radio, now apparently capable of picking up BBC Alba when it’s feeling in a good mood.

When the tea’s cooled enough for him to taste, it’s exactly how Martin likes it. Jon does everything he can to try and not look like he’s overly invested in whether he’s done it right, and Martin fails to obscure his smile behind the rim of the mug.

The second night, they sleep in beds. Well. A bed. Martin is a little surprised when Jon follows him into the same room, almost without thought, almost as though he’d not remembered that they could spend time apart, and then they are both stammering and overlaying each other’s words, and they’re both not sure what they are trying to apologise for.

But then Jon’s glancing up at him, and it’s rare that he stands still, his eyes usually flicking to a hundred different things.

His eyes are steady as the horizon line as he reaches out for Martin’s hand, and no, maybe it’s not such a surprise after all.


	37. mirror

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Martin looks like his dad.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For a prompt on Tumblr. 
> 
> Because of the subject matter, there's content warnings in the end notes.

The first time Martin sees his own face, limp-eyed, flat and drained in the feeble straining light of the bathroom, he starts shaking. A stretching in his chest, like he's swallowed a swelling balloon that is pushing all the air out of him, bunging up his lungs and throat and mouth. That's how Jon finds him, tears sprung to his eyes as he sucks in scant and skittish breathes, his fingers clenching the lip of the sink and wondering why he can't be stronger than all this. 

After that, Martin takes to avoiding mirrors while he's in the safehouse.

It's not hard. He's had lots of practise recently. The Lonely had displayed many double-edged poisons in its folds disguised as furtive blessings. His reflection had been one of them. Martin had counted it as a grateful novelty, to walk past glass shop fronts and the over-stark bathroom mirrors in the staff toilets and see the refusal of light to grant his image returned to him. Even his exile to the seafront, the rock-pools vacant of crawling life or stubborn salt-encrusted fronds of lichen, had shown him only the eddy of tide, the ripples that his steps barely disturbed in the landscape.

It had been a kindness of sorts, to take his image from him. The mirror had never shown Martin anything but things he hadn't cared to see, his own neurosis writ large and backwards.

The morning is not unusual. The birds had woken him, piping shrill even through the double glazing, and Jon, still dozy and drooling his words into his pillow, had cursed and moaned indignant at the vocal wildlife. Martin had dropped back off for another twenty or so minutes, a smirk raising the sleep-dry corners of his lips, waking up when the bed creaked and Jon had stood and stretched and made all sorts of horrendous cracking noises like some sort of human castanet.

This morning though, Jon is in the bathroom, shaving, and making a worrying racket doing so, and Martin is still in that sort of headachy realm of not quite awake yet, where he still gathering the components than make him functional as he shuffles around in his boxers and waits for the shower to be free. Martin's not sure why today, but he finds himself opening the wardrobe. Inside, on the back of the left-hand side door, there's a full length mirror, pocked a little with age and smeared with dust.

Martin's not sure why he feels strong enough today to look.

The thing he expects to see first: his hair shorn down, just shy of a buzz cut. Martin's been doing it himself for years, every month or so hunching over the sink and bathroom mirror in his old flat in Stockwell and uniformly mowing his hair down to a prickly ginger fuzz.

His mum never liked his hair when he grew it out. Snapped and sniped about how long it was getting whenever it started to bend in a curl, encroaching over his ears, and he'd not always had the money or time to go into town and go to the barber's. When he got his first job, scrimping aside the little he'd left over at the end of the month, he'd bought clippers from the nearest Boots, attached the first guard he'd picked up and ran it over his scalp until the up-scrub was spiky and even. The first time was a bit of a hack-job, lopsided and uneven, but he's improved his technique with time. The method and cut was cheap and basic and he wasn't fond of the way it made his ears look stuck out, but it was one less thing he had to worry about, one less thing his mum could disapprove of.

His hair now hangs, uninspired, slightly greasy and knotted over his ears. Shaggy-dog over his forehead until he swipes it back, a small curl down to the nape of his neck.

He looks like his dad. Sees the man he barely knew staring back, the image lost that Elias had so viciously returned. Studies his snubnose struck centre, a wide jaw that rounds out his face, ruddy cheeks with sparse and spotting freckles. Some of the hairs of his eyebrows are starting to grey. His eyes seem suspicious, washed out, unhappy. He wonders if this is what Jon sees, a man whose closed-off expression does not appear to trust the world nor its motives.

The sort of man who might just up and leave if the going gets tough.

Jon pads into the room, though Martin doesn't turn round. He puts all his weight on the front of his feet, always has; even in the Archives, Martin could place Jon's footsteps next to Sasha's sturdier stride, Tim's faster tread.

Jon plants his face against Martin's back, grumbles through a good morning. He's smooth jawed again, his skin baking from the shower, his hair not quite towelled off properly, still dripping.

“Lookin' handsome,” Jon mumbles, throwing out a hand to gesture at the mirror, at the twin men standing awkward and self-conscious opposite each other.

Martin observes at his own hands cast back at him through the mirror. His thick arms, the round and pasty pale of them. He has big hands, he thinks to himself. Broad, weathered palms, the skin cracking dry, short and stubby fingers. Hair starts to grow sparse on the back of his hand close to his wrist and only gets thicker and denser up his arms. Jon slumped standing immediately behind him isn't visible in the reflection; Martin's body takes up too much room, wide and solid, even when he wants to secrete himself smaller. He's tall, like Dad was, he guesses, though he stoops and hunches in his shoulders to try and negate it. Martin thinks he looks like the sort of man that plays rugby and drinks too much. When he's walking home, trudging through the residential streets between the tube station and his flat, people passing him sometimes scrunch their body in away from him, and every time that hurts. In the dark, without his stumbling words and over-eager expression and his clumsiness, something about him looks like it could turn nasty, and Martin doesn't know how to take that.

He went drinking with Tim and Sasha once in Lambeth. They'd had four or five and Sasha had bought them obnoxiously coloured and overpriced cocktails before dragging Tim over to the pool table, Martin sitting out to the side amiably, sipping his sugar-heavy drink and tapping his feet to the music someone put on the jukebox. Two men came over ten minutes later, drunker than them, arguing that they'd been there first, and Sasha had been fired up enough to snap back. It had looked like a scrap brewing, so Martin had put his drink down and stood up, anxiously ready and willing to urge Tim and Sasha away just to keep the peace. The two had looked at him, eyes roving up before they held up their hands, backing off, saying they'd come back when they'd finish.

“_No bother, ey, big lad?” _they'd slurred at Martin. “_Didn't mean anything by it.”_

Sasha had beamed as they left, and called Martin a lucky charm. He hadn't felt very lucky. He'd felt sick at the reminder. 

The problem as he sees it, is that everything about him is big.

Inside: too big heart and too raw-open soul. A great vast reservoir where he keeps every bubbling expression of fear and grief and rage that he's never expressed with his body.

Outside: big stocky arms, an over-hanging stomach matched with a tall spine and the sort of footsteps that announce his arrival well before he enters a room.

Martin's dad never hit his mum. He assumes that's something Elias would have glibly enjoyed sharing. But sometimes he'd stood too close when they'd been fighting, looming, deliberately crowding in her space, and she'd noticed how much taller he was, how much stronger. She'd thought she saw something mean and nasty in his eyes, the way he clenched his fists that meant he wanted to.

She'd imagined she saw that look in her son sometimes too.

Martin worries about that. Worries what other poisoned legacies his dad left him with.

“Mart'n?” Jon says. He's encircled his arms as far as he can around him, though they don't link up, scratching his nails through the hair on his chest. His hands long-boned but smaller, slighter.

Jon is not a small man nor a tall one, average in appearance in most ways if not for the scars, if not for the way the composite of his image makes Martin's heart something stronger in his chest. But Martin is bigger than him when they lie together, Jon's side of the bed made less by default, shunting him further over to the corners. Martin is stronger than him, because Martin has lifted him bodily to hear Jon's laughing protestations as Martin manhandled him onto the sofa and kissed the veins down his throat, the blush risen in his cheeks.

And Martin's angrier than he used to be. Or angrier than he used to admit to being. His mood pinballing from flat to frustrated as everything the Lonely dulled ploughs back into him, all of Martin's mechanisms, the checks-and-balances he built within himself gone ruinous. Martin can be so angry these days, and he doesn't know how to deal with it.

Martin doesn't like the way that worry fizzes under his tongue.

“My dad had big hands,” he says out of nowhere. “He wore some rings, I think, and he had to get them resized to fit his fingers.”

“You making plans to get us rings already?”

Jon's joke is shy and nudging, but Martin doesn't feel like raising the corners of his mouth in a smile.

Martin moves a hand to squeeze the flesh that bunches around his upper arms, pats his stomach.

“I've definitely got his belly,” he says. “His arms. Prob'ly end up with his hair to boot, he was receding a bit.”

Jon's hands stroke palm down over what stomach he can reach.

“I like your stomach,” he says, and it's not that Martin doesn't believe him, because he's getting better at not doubting people, at allowing himself to trust they might like something about him. It's that that wasn't the point.

“Hmm,” Martin says noncommittally, and glances at his own hands again. Square chewed nails and the small bumps of veins.

“You don't look happy,” Jon says.

“What? No, I mean, it – it's fine, it's...”

“Do you... not like looking in the mirror?”

Martin sighs.

“Not particularly.”

“Because you have a problem with how you look?”

“You don't have to spell it out like that, Jon.”

“Like what?”

“Like you're a – my therapist or something. I don't want to – to be questioned o-or psychoanalysed about it. I just, no – I don't like looking at myself. That's all.”

Jon's arms don't unhook from around him. Martin exhales and feels the frustration like sediment build up.

“I look exactly like my dad,” Martin says finally, bitterly.

“You don't,” Jon replies quietly, into the meat of Martin's shoulder.

“You can't know that,” Martin says, although the words are empty of meaning and they both know it. Jon both can and does, whether he means to or not.

Feeling his Adam's apple bob, he continues: “Elias, he showed me. When I was – er, when we needed him distracted.”

Jon's arms clench around him.

“Elias showed you what he wanted you to see,” he says after a careful moment.

Martin shakes his head, because he saw what he'd known already, what his mum had seen, the trickle of memory gushing torrential. That he has his dad's big fingers, big hands and big anger, and he is frightened of what sort of a man that makes him.

“I could....” Jon's fingers flex and skate over the skin where Martin's stretch marks root down to his hips. “I could look? If you wanted? Tell you if Elias was... if what he showed you was true.”

Martin thinks about it, but Jon feels the silence of his refusal and presses his nose against the freckled handful of skin where Martin's shoulder blades are.

“I'll tell you what I see then?”

“See see, you mean?”

“No. Normal seeing. With my own two eyeballs.”

“I am being blessed with the originals today, what a gift.”

Jon headbutts him with his forehead, and the small laugh and a '_Jon!_' is pushed out of him as a scarred palm is held up near his face, an eyelid opening in the skin to leer at Martin.

“Put your bloody Pan's Labyrinth eyeball away,” Martin grouches, and he can feel Jon grinning mischievous as the disconcerting eyeball winks before being sunk closed back into the skin.

“Better?”

“I am _never _going to get used to that.”

Jon makes a noise of agreement. He unplasters himself from Martin's back, and takes a tugging hold of his wrist.

“Look at me?”

Martin lets himself be turned round. Weak-willed, soft-spined to the last wherever Jon is concerned.

Jon looking up at him now, fringed with damp locks seaweeding down his face. Martin brushes them back out of the way, and Jon captures his hand, meshes their fingers together slowly and precisely.

“Tell me?” he asks quietly. “What you've been thinking about? And I'll tell you what I see.”

“My hands,” Martin says after a moment and Jon nods and hums and holds Martin's captured palm in front of him.

“Bigger than mine,” Jon says, demonstrating, holding the two of them as imperfect reflections of each other. “You've got short nails because you bite them. The cold's making the skin dry, but they're soft, usually. Sturdy. Even when – even when we were leaving the Lonely, I knew once you took my hand we wouldn't get separated.”

“My – er, my arms,” Martin says after a while, prodding with his free hand at the loose flesh at the undersides of his arms. “Well, my bingo wings.”

Jon frowns, reaches up to encircle his grip around them.

“You've got muscle under there,” he says. “You can lift me, no trouble. The first time you did, I, um, couldn't help but hope you'd do it again.”

Martin finds it in himself to meet Jon's gaze.

“Yeah?” he says, pleased.

Jon is starting to blotch with blush, but he carries on, fingers stroking Martin's upper arms.

“Even if you weren't strong,” he says. “You've got – your, um. Freckles. There's no pattern to them, of course, but I like seeing if I can find one anyway.”

“You're a big softie,” Martin chides roughly, dry-mouthed and watery eyed.

Jon doesn't deny it.

“What else?” he asks delicately.

“I'm – I'm heavy,” Martin says, the words shrivelling quiet on his tongue. “I-I don't mind – I'm not ashamed of being, you know, not the smallest guy, I've never had a-a problem with it, not exactly, but I-I'm bigger than you. I'm stronger than you and I take up more room and, my dad, I look _so _much like him s-s-so what if – ”

He trails off. Swallowing. Unable to finish.

Jon's arms embrace him and he allows himself to be bent down, the angle uncomfortable and Jon on tip-toe, his face mushed into the side of Jon's throat.

Jon rubs at the broad expanse of his back.

“You'd never hurt me,” Jon says, fiercely. “Whether you look like your father or not. You're not _him, _Martin. I can't, I know I can't convince you, but it doesn't _matter _if you've got his arms or his eyes or his hair. He's never been where you've been, or done what you've managed. I bet he doesn't – doesn't write poetry, or whistle the Archer's theme tune, or I dunno, is completely useless at catching things.” Martin gives a wet attempt at a laugh. Jon's hands move comfortingly up and down.

“You're not your dad,” Jon continues after a moment. “You aren't responsible for the man he was, or the man your mother thought she saw in you. That's not – it's not your burden to carry. Fuck whatever shadows Elias showed you. You're not him. It's – I can't make you like what you see in the mirror, but when I look at you, I don't see any of the things you're scared of.”

“You can really just, know all that, huh,” Martin says after a minute, lifting up his head, rubbing his eyes with his hand.

“I don't need to,” Jon replies.

Martin's hugs are crushing and enveloping but Jon clings back as tightly.

Martin pulls back after a minute, wiping his eyes again though he knows they've gone red and puffy, already feeling the crimping heat of self-consciousness in his chest. Jon leans back in to kiss him, first his lips, and then his cheek, quick and affirming, as he trails his fingers through his hair.

“You'll be wanting this cut soon,” Jon says, although he seems disappointed at the thought, combing his fingers through the tangle self-indulgently.

“I might try growing it out.” Martin tests the water of the idea, and Jon looks approving at this, nods and hums and runs his fingers through again.

It's been a long time since his hair was longer. Martin thinks he might suit it.

“What would you say to a beard?” Martin follows up, just to see Jon try to valiantly quash his dissatisfaction and keep a neutral expression. He almost succeeds.

“If you... If you think it best,” Jon manages stiffly. 

Martin's laugh is a free and booming thing in his chest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for  
* self-esteem and body image issues  
* discussion of anger management issues  
* mention of domestic violence  
* small blink-and-you'll-miss it (ha!) mention of eye-based body horror.


	38. conclusions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They find Daisy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was entirely written and inspired by @speakerunfolding's [absolutely amazing artwork](https://speakerunfolding.tumblr.com/post/624716815117991936/me-hiatus-is-fine-i-will-think-about-other). Go look at it and weep.
> 
> (set post-176, no spoilers)
> 
> Content warnings in the end notes

“We - we have to go,” Basira says. Martin did not think her voice could do that, drop blunted and edgeless, wind-knocked and crackling, the places where it wears thin revealed. She does not lean as close to his bowed form as the laden-shouldered woodland, the noose of branch-sway and bird-song and the far off howls of some unluckier prey, but her voice intrudes, interrupts.

“I can't,” he replies. Meaning, _I won't._ His burden is the heaviest thing he has ever held up. Slots soaking against his coat like a wreck that the tide has buffeted ceaselessly to port anyway. He thinks, the thought blushed with hysteric, that he does not want to put him down because then, his shirt might get dirty, with the mulched disintegrating tile-work of leaves and staining dirt and the gory stain puddling beneath them both and seeping into the fabric of Martin's knees.

“There will be more. They'll – the blood, they'll smell it.”

It freckles his face. Spelks of red under his nails. His tears have scratched funnels down his cheeks like claw marks, and the punched-out excavation in his chest is stuffed with a horror that is only mounting, spinning out like cotton. The forest has slid back into almost silence, and his own breathing is a cruelty he did not know he could suffer.

“Go then,” he snaps back, except it breaks at the end, and he swallows the splintered scraps of his anger back down.

He brushes a blood-tipped tangle back from Jon's face, the silvering strands of hair that have caught his age, the colour of hoar-frost. Cheeks matted with mud and tears and branch scratches like the spidering chips in pottery.

Basira does not leave. She returns to her own sorrow easily, a mourning garden she's already spent so long tending to growth, kneeling, knees going soggy with the dirt, crossing arms returned human-formed across a chest impacted with a bullet crater.

Martin's sorrow is not so silent. He muffles it into chilling skin, chokes the wail scaling the cliffs of this throat, and there would be words, but he has spent them all on begging, on pleading and prayer and petition, so it is a tidal wash of noise that layers him like a snowbank, that crushes and crumples him cold.

Jon's eyes are closed, his expression slack and peaceful, and that does not bring Martin the comfort he wishes it would. He was not meant to complete this journey alone. Daisy's claws split his skin easily as opening curtains, and he had not struggled as her maw made a vice around his neck, a necklace of rending toothmarks before Basira's gun had fired.

Martin wants to know _why _and will never be granted that.

“Martin,” Basira says, after a long long time.

“I'm not leaving him,” Martin replies, throat swollen, eyes pudged with a painful reddening. “N-not here. Not to this place. It doesn't get to take everything.”

“Alright,” Basira responds, and it's a kindness of sorts, this camaraderie of loss. “I. I know a place.”

It's still in the Hunt's domain, nominally. On the edge, the borders between domains frayed like worn carpeting. Set apart, a muddy glade bracketed with the arched ribs of trees, the howling tuned down to mingle with the cry and swoop of creatures that cannot be birds.

This is not the first time Martin has carried Jon. All his height held in his legs, which loll, overhanging his hold. The blood is beginning to harden clotting and claggy over the rips in his shirt, drained to the seat of his jeans and the back of his thighs. The red browning off to a darker scabbing. A vivid and morbid artistry amongst the shadowing green of leaves. He is heavy, but Martin takes his duties solemnly, so his arms are sure and his grip sturdy, taking care not to dig his fingers in too tight.

Basira carries Daisy on her back, crone-hunched with her own grief, and they say nothing to each other as they walk.

They bury them in loaming ground, shawled with woodland.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings:  
* major character death  
* grief and mourning  
* blood and injury detail

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Reclaim - Podfic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24499672) by [Elfgrunge](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elfgrunge/pseuds/Elfgrunge)


End file.
